TOK Friends

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

The public accepts this as a matter of course. They hardly expect anything to be real nowadays.

Let’s stay with 1996 for a moment—because it was a turning point. Before that time, Susan Sontag had been very receptive to popular culture—movies, commercial music, and campy pop art. But each of these was becoming unrecognizable in their turn-of-the-century guises.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the top grossing films of that year.

These films were all different—but they had one thing in common: overwhelming special effects. In the final years of the twentieth century, computer technology had reached a level where massive levels of destruction could be shown on screen with an immediacy never before possible. Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased. The advent of AI will now accelerate this even further. We may soon reach the point where nothing on the screen is real.

Carlyle rightly mocks the citizens of France who, in those days, put so much trust in paper—whether the deceptive newspapers or the collapsing paper currency. Humans had once created a Stone Age and an Iron Age—but now settled for the Age of Paper.

By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.

So are you surprised that everything in culture has a feeling of unreality right now? It’s like cotton candy that shrinks to nothing as soon as you put it in your mouth, just leaving a brief sickly sweet taste.

Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked. (I will write about that more in the future.)

This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. The dreamer does not want to awaken from the dream.

Here’s the scariest part of the story: Most of this is by design. Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.

A psychoanalyst would say that the hostility here is displaced—like people who kick the dog because they hate their boss.

In a cotton candy society, everything feels insubstantial:People go to war online—in toxic Twitter posts—but it’s a fake war with the angriest combatants typically hiding behind avatars.People seek love online, but even here the fakeness is toxic—hence many are catfished (a term that didn’t exist a few years ago) by scammers pretending to be a romantic interest. People not only work and play online, but even construct their selves online—which is where their identity increasingly resides.

These are all signs that we are living in a society running low on seriousness.

Ah, the word action. That’s fallen out of favor, too—another symptom worth noting. Here’s the Google analysis of its usage since the year 1900.

The decline in the word action accelerated during the same period that saw the rise (shown above) in the word fake. They are mirror images of the same cultural shift.

Participants at Normandy and Selma were taking action. But soup hurlers operate at a symbolic level, or (let’s be honest) a less-than-symbolic level—because these paintings have no connection in any way with the issues at stake.

The targeted paintings aren’t appropriate symbols of the evil they are supposed to represent. In fact, they embody the exact opposite.

It’s not mere coincidence that anger and violence are targeted at objects that are inescapablyrealtangibleuniqueauthentic (that word again!)produced by human hand

Can you build a culture on cotton candy? We will soon find out.

In an age of fakery, people who operate without seriousness will inevitably focus their hostility on precisely these cherished objects.

he cluelessness in Cupertino is understandable. The dominant companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by reality and seriousness—which are like Kryptonite to the digital agenda. So these mishaps are inevitable. Fakery is now a business model. Reality is its hated competitor.

here’s the most salient fact of all: People who have their act together are now taking things very seriously in there own lives. They aren't waiting for guidance from an app from the Apple Store or a post from an influencer.

let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.

Five years from now, the cultural landscape will look much different. I expect a lot will change in just the next 12 months.

COMING SOON: I will write about “How to Become a Serious Person.”

It is terribly difficult to make people care about things they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the trust necessary to lead your audience.

As a result, news organizations frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the guise of newsworthiness.

Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.

Cardiologists have long known that patients like those in the trial — people with failing heart valves but no symptoms — could sometimes deteriorate or even die.

Cardiologists were wary of replacing valves partly because, until recent decades, that would have required open-heart surgery, a risk that hardly seemed worth taking for patients who were able to go about their lives without trouble.

The emergence of a less invasive surgery opened the door to a different approach. In that surgery, called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, cardiologists insert a replacement valve through a patient’s groin and thread it all the way to the heart.

And then if you ask those SAME PEOPLE okay: well if that’s the CASE… then how should we be TREATING other people or cultures that see things differently than YOU do. And again for a lot of young people LIVING in a postmodern society their answer is often…that we should treat them with TOLERANCE.

And it makes SENSE: see because in a world where every moral conclusion is equally valid…then, of COURSE, you should be TOLERANT of people to be able hold whatever positions they WANT to. 

there’s OTHER people out there that would say to this person… that this tolerant relativism is actually…a glaring contradiction. That it’s SUCH A contradiction that it actually becomes an indefensible, philosophical position…because if every person and every culture out there is equally correct about morality…then that would mean that even the most INTOLERANT cultures, would have to be right as well

Which then makes your ADDITIONAL belief that TOLERANCE is the CORRECT way to be BEHAVING in this world…it makes it INCOMPATIBLE with TRUE moral relativism. 

the reason YOUNG people would be the ones that you see HOLDING this kind of position… is because they often times haven’t really been TESTED yet in life…where there’s a LINE in the sand and they’re FORCED to TAKE SIDES in difficult, moral issues, that NEED a decision to be made. 

Tolerant Relativism if you wanted to break it down…is REALLY something you see MOSTLY… in privileged, wealthy, WESTERN societies…because they would say the ONLY type of person that can HOLD that position for very long… are people that live in societies that are PEACEFUL enough… that they don’t really HAVE some group that opposes their entire existence that they feel they need to DEFEND themselves against. 

You know they’d say it’s funny… how your moral relativism starts to FADE a bit the second there’s a dude with an axe on your doorstep…it’s a pretty difficult act to pull off when you’re watching your family get dismembered in front of you to say your beliefs, my beliefs…let’s just call it halfsies halfsies why don’t we. 

Again there’s SOME people out there that would say that TRUE moral reasoning…. ONLY actually begins…when someone DECLARES a set of moral universals…and then is mature enough to recognize the WEIGHT and COMPLEXITY that comes along with DOING something like that.

as we talked about a couple episodes ago to Zizek: EVEN WITHIN something like postmodernism… that on the surface is SKEPTICAL of ANY of these universals…in the sense that postmodernism ELEVATES DIFFERENCE and CELEBRATES it as the most important factor…to someone like Zizek…this is NOT a postmodernist REJECTING universals…to HIM this is JUST creating a UNIVERSAL out of DIFFERENCE. 

maybe it’s IMPOSSIBLE for someone to NOT be following moral universals…it’s just possible for people to not be AWARE of the ones they’re supporting…or to live in a place that’s PEACEFUL enough to not REQUIRE you to look at yours deeper. 

let’s PROCEED from here as though this is the case. That a VERY important piece of making ANY sort of PROGRESS in the world…is GOING to require people to DECLARE certain moral universals…and then to be able to ACT on them without having to apologize for them constantly. 

This PERSON would say there’s an INFINITE number of WAYS that history can be interpreted…and OUR responsibility is to SUBVERT the existing narratives and tell the stories of the voiceless from the past!

IF that is TRUE…then it would make TOTAL SENSE to Mark Fisher why the cultural LOGIC of postmodernism…LEAVES us in a PLACE he thinks…where we are COMPLETELY STUCK…in the present. 

he CALLS the western world a society that has a memory condition: the western world has what’s called anterograde amnesia. 

: there’s a MOVIE that can help illustrate his point here. Mark Fisher compares how we are as a society…to the character named Leonard…in the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan in the year 2000

The main character is a guy named Leonard…that can’t FORM new memories. Importantly in the movie he’s ALSO a guy whose wife was murdered not too long ago.

And he remembers EVERYTHING about his life up until a certain POINT…but once he gets sick, no matter how hard he tries, he just doesn’t remember anything BEYOND that.

Now in the movie…he’s ALSO trying to SOLVE the murder of his wife, so whenever he gets a piece of information he doesn’t want to forget that could help him figure it out…he tattoos it on his body, he takes a bunch of pictures, he makes notes about it…he essentially is a man…that has a MAJOR MYSTERY that he needs to solve that is SUPER important to him, but is constantly living in this HAZE where he CAN’T form new memories has to be SKEPTICAL of everything around him and lives pretty much every day in a state of confusion. 

To Mark Fisher…this DESCRIBES the life of a modern person maybe BETTER than it first may seem, and it CERTAINLY describes the condition of society overall. We are LIVING in a state of CULTURAL amnesia…where we CAN’T remember our PAST, which then makes it IMPOSSIBLE to accurately diagnose the present, and even MORE difficult to be able to IMAGINE a different social future that may be better off for people. 

THINK of the CONFUSION that postmodernism often LEAVES people in. When you QUESTION…GRAND NARRATIVES about the world you live in…and MORE than that: when QUESTIONING narratives and universals BECOMES something that’s VERY important to yo

the COST of that often times are the things that TRADITIONALLY, have GIVEN people a clear sense of IDENTITY all throughout human history: that is the METANARRATIVES that UNIFY societies together around certain common stories we have about reality. 

As an example: THINK of how this applies to HISTORY…as ONE of those common stories societies usually have.

There’s ONE version of history that’s taught to people in CLASSROOMS…that centers history around great WARS that have taken place. Memorizing a bunch of dates…THIS is when Napoleon invaded Russia…THIS is when the Magna Carta was signed…in other words: HUMAN HISTORY… is just a progression of different great leaders… SEIZING territory from each other. 

And there’s a CRITICISM of that view that is well received by people in post modern society that says: well THAT’S not the whole story of what humanity is! We’re talking about ALL human BEINGS here…HUMAN history is JUST as much the summer romance between two people that fall in love…the life of a street vendor in 9th century baghdad…

that could BE because you live in a really safe, peaceful country…it could ALSO just be you MANUFACTURING a peaceful environment like that in your LIFE, by surrounding yourself with FRIENDS who all AGREE with you. 

again this is generally seen as a REALLY NICE sentiment to people LIVING in a postmodern world. 

But what that ALSO brings along with it some people say…is a CREATIVE LICENSE to able to REINTERPRET human history…and PRESENT it in a way that just BENEFITS whatever political ends you’re trying to JUSTIFY. 

For example in MY country the United States…the FOUNDING FATHERS of our country, who WERE any of these dudes with buckles on me shoes and powdered wigs? Like what’s the TRUE answer to that question?

in MANY cases in postmodern society…it all depends on what side of the political aisle you LAND on…ONE side of it interprets history in a way where these men were some of the greatest political minds to have ever LIVED on planet earth, launching the greatest experiment in nation building that has EVER been launched.

Now it’s ALSO possible to see these men as SLAVE owners, bigots, people that were actively complicit in the extermination of the native americans, and MUCH MORE. But WHICH one of these is TRUE? 

you’ll SEE this happen when it comes to MOST of a postmodern subject’s view of history. Where DEPENDING on what STORY you believe about the recent PAST of the place you live in…that will DETERMINE the way that you see the present, and then what you think the next, best MOVES are for the futur

But if nobody can AGREE on what their HISTORY is…then HISTORY isn’t a METANARRATIVE anymore that UNIFIES a society…HISTORY just becomes this fragmented STORY that’s used as an INSTRUMENT to prove your political bias. The SAME events, the SAME historical FIGURES…the MEANING of them will COMPLETELY CHANGE depending on who’s EVOKING them.

HISTORY is not the ONLY example of a metanarrative that’s been deconstructed to the point that it no longer has the same unifying potential as in former societies

From shared rituals, community bonds, a shared conception of truth more generally, MOST things that unify your understanding of what your culture is all about, and who YOU are as a person WITHIN that culture.

there’s a REASON SEVERAL, modern day philosophers… have DESCRIBED the world we live in… as Schizophrenic.

that’s obviously not a CLINICAL diagnosis they’re making…

t’s a metaphor for the TYPE of experience that’s often available for people, where there’s a BREAKDOWN… of these unifying metanarratives...that help us develop a CLEAR sense of who we ARE…and an obvious, DEFINED POSITION within the world around us with clear boundaries to it. 

Feeling confused, like you DON’T REALLY know what’s going on, and you don’t know who or what to read to FIGURE out what’s going on, and you think the ONE thing that’s for sure is that people that CLAIM to know what’s going on, are CLEARLY idiots, and you feel like every year sort of blends into the next with no REAL prospects on the horizon for different ways of living that may come about in the future…this is a COMMON complaint…of people LIVING in postmodern culture

it’s BECAUSE postmodernism…at bottom…IS the critique of the critique. It is a reaction video to a reaction video about reality. It is FUNDAMENTALLY, NOT ABOUT CONSTRUCTING any NEW cultural forms…it’s about DECONSTRUCTION. It’s about the elevation of DIFFERENCE to the level of the universal. 

This is what MAKES the critique so EFFECTIVE…but it ALSO COMES with certain social effects. It becomes VERY difficult to go EXTERNAL to yourself to find MEANING…or to DECLARE universals and look to the FUTURE as a way out

So, what HAPPENS…is when people can’t go EXTERNAL they turn INWARD towards NARCISSISM…and because they can’t go FORWARDS they turn BACKWARDS towards nostalgia. 

HIS is going to be the other part of this unique BLEND we talked about last episode that is going to LEAD us to this state of affairs called Capitalist Realism

Where everything we talked about LAST episode with neoliberalism, the focus is on the individual and the expansion of CAPITAL for the sake of CAPITAL…gets combined with postmodernism…that puts people in a HAZE where they are CONFUSED and INCAPABLE of ORIENTING themselves in TIME…let ALONE being able to imagine a different social future. 

To put it ANOTHER way: we are STUCK for Mark Fisher in a confused, narcissistic PRESENT moment…with NO conception of what the future should look like.

And as HE said: Capitalist Realism’s IMPOSSIBLE to define in a single sentence…the best way to SHOW people what Capitalist Realism is…is just to give them example, after example… that they can see in the world all around them

show through examples how IN this postmodern, neoliberal VACUUM that’s been created…how we ACCEPT the FALSE reality that CAPITALISM…is NOT an economic system…it’s just simply the WAY the world is, with no hope of changing it. 

The problem here is not just the imaginary friends or imaginary communities. It’s that more and more of us don’t have the real thing.

As Jon put it in The Anxious Generation, there was Act I of the Tragedy: the disappearance of the play-based childhood. Then came Act II: the rise of the phone-based childhood. But as he and Zach began to realize, there was actually an Act before both of these—the loss of local community.

Payne cites a famous experiment by Henri Tajfel, a pioneering figure in social psychology, who found that his students heaped exorbitant significance onto a distinction as meaningless as whether they overestimated or underestimated the number of dots in a picture. The students started favoring the members of their “in group” and disparaging the members of the “out group.”

Payne says that he has repeatedly replicated the effect in his own classes: “Underestimators quickly assume that they are the realistic and cautious group, and hence smarter and better than the overestimators. Overestimators, on the other hand, assume that they are optimistic and positive people, and hence better than the dreary underestimators.”

It doesn’t take much for people to turn trivial differences into psychologically potent chasms between “us” and “them.

Early in his book he recounts the surreal experience of asking his brother Brad if he believed that Trump had won the 2020 election. To Payne’s surprise, Brad admitted that Biden had won — but only, Brad specified, “by the letter of the law,” adding that “there was some malfeasance,” even if “it can’t be proven.” Payne could see how this conclusion allowed his brother “to come to terms with the evidence” while also letting him “hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s win was, deep down, illegitimate.”

most of us identify as the “good reasonable people” of his title. Our “psychological immune systems” kick in to discount or reject any information that would make us think otherwise. We want to believe that we seek the cold, hard truth while they wallow in self-serving lies

We also live at a time when ostensible validation for any belief is only a click away. “People are not passive dupes,” Payne explains, “but rather they seek out the stories they want to be told. If one channel shuts down, they just find another.”

Morris, for his part, uses the term “epistemic tribalism” to describe the tendency of people to reach conclusions through “peer-instinct conformist learning” — a fancy way of saying that we’re susceptible to the influence of peers

Morris says that rationality isn’t our “strong suit,” but rationalizing is. He offers the example of students who were given a fake newspaper article about a congressional vote. The policy details made no difference to their evaluations of the plan. If their party voted for it, they liked it; if the other party voted for it, they didn’t — and they denied that party loyalty had anything to do with their views.

our “tribal instincts” are what enabled early humans to collaborate, generating the kind of “coordinated activity” and “common knowledge” that allowed our species to flourish

If we can find a way to “harness tribal impulses,” Morris writes, we could “heal a nation.”

Morris argues that such discrimination persists because of “ethical tribalism,” which “involves no anger, malice or ill regard” toward others, but which bends the rules in favor of one’s own “clan” — people who pass the “culture fit” test because they come from the same group

Undoubtedly the people who do the discriminating would like to see themselves this way — not as hostile and mean (toward others), but as kind and generous (toward their own).

seems eager to reassure readers that, whatever their political allegiances, their motives are not just understandable but good; they are not acting on ugly prejudices from “a century or half a century ago.”

“Bringing about political change is separate from debating politics,” writes Payne, who goes on to explain that genuine persuasion requires trust and connection — both of which seem to be in diminishing supply these days

He says that change is slow, and connecting mostly requires interacting one on one

But people have to want to build that trust in the first place

“Unlike a newsroom where many stories are often checked, fact-checked and triple-checked by copy editors and others to make sure it’s verifiably accurate, the same isn’t necessarily true of political news influencers,

It is the informality and break from tradition, however, that are among the keys to news influencers’ increasing prominence. People want “someone that they relate to and trust” to interpret and curate their news

Share of U.S. adults who regularly get news from TikTok, by age group

No news-focused creator broke through as often this summer as Harry Sisson, CredoIQ data shows. The 22-year-old New York University senior drove more than 100 million views from viral posts in June and July through what he calls “a mix of news and advocacy for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.”

Sisson’s July video reporting Biden’s exit from the race, in which he called Biden a “fantastic president,” has 1.3 million views—more than the TikTok videos on the same topic from CBS News, MSNBC and C-Span.

“A lot of people get their news from social media,” said Sisson, who said he aggregates news for his one million-plus followers from a variety of sources, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. “If I can be a reliable outlet in the eyes of the people, I want to fill that role.”

Joey Contino, 33, who is based in New Jersey and runs an account focused on politics and the Russia-Ukraine war, says viewers are drawn to creators’ stripped-down, conversational approach to news.

“When it comes to mainstream media, I understand they have a certain way they do their broadcast, in front of the lights, in front of the screens,” Contino said. “I think we’re more in the realm of hearing things from your best friend than hearing things on TV.”

He rarely gives his opinion, he said, other than his view that Ukraine should be supported in its war against Russia. Contino’s 240 viral posts this summer picked up more than 35 million views.

The Journal’s analysis covered the 200 accounts with the most viral political posts excluding those that were inactive or not English-language. The Journal categorized the accounts as news influencers, legacy outlets or others, such as politicians and comedians, based on criteria developed with several media researchers.

As a whole, the influencers’ feeds were more likely to lean either progressive or conservative, the Journal found, and 80% of them were classified as partisan by CredoIQ. Legacy-media accounts, on the other hand, were more politically independent, according to CredoIQ, which assigns partisanship leanings based on the views expressed by creators and topics they cover.

Share of TikTok accounts with the most viral* political posts in June and July, by account type and partisanship

These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience

The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives. 

Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”

A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project). 

Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.

that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense.

That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.

I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.)

They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for.

what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends

The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).

As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story. 

a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.

I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse.

The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education

Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.

When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense

“We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.”

“How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight.

I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity

The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake.

This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless

The term “deep state” comes from countries like Egypt and Turkey where the security services acted for many years as a shadow government. The United States has never had a deep state in this sense, except in the fevered imaginations of the MAGA right. It does have a permanent civil service that operates at federal, state, and local levels, and it is these that have become a regular conservative punching bag.

The Loper Bright decision invalidated a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service requiring Atlantic fishing boats to carry, at their own expense, inspectors judging compliance with rules against overfishing. In ruling in favor of the fishing companies, SCOTUS invalidated the Chevron precedent entirely. This decision built on the same narrative feeding the Project 2025 plan: the administrative state had grown into a monster that made decisions harming the well-being of citizens without any fundamental democratic accountability.

The second initiative was the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision issued in late June that abolished the 1984 Chevron Deference precedent. Chevron Deference provided a rule under which the courts would defer to the expert opinions of executive branch agencies in situations where a Congressional mandate was ambiguous or unclear, and the agency position seemed reasonable.

At the heart of the conservative critique of the administrative state lies a vision of democratic government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in which citizens would deliberate together on policies, and would themselves be responsible for carrying them out much as one imagines occurred in the proverbial New England town hall.

The problem, however, is the extreme complexity of the tasks that modern government is expected to accomplish.

None of these functions can be performed by ordinary citizens; they must be delegated to experts whose life work centers around the complex tasks they perform.

While some local issues could be settled on a local level, modern government does things like manage the money supply, regulate giant international banks, certify the safety and efficacy of drugs, forecast weather, control air traffic, intercept and decrypt the communications of adversaries, perform employment surveys, and monitor fraud in the payment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the Social Security and Medicare programs

Substantial delegation is therefore necessary. Some conservatives believe in a Constitutional “non-delegation doctrine,” but Congress has been delegating responsibility for complex tasks ever since Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was given the job of cleaning up Revolutionary War debt by the first Congress of the United States.

Nor is it the case that the people’s elected representatives have no means of monitoring and holding accountable the bureaucracy they have created. There are both ex ante and ex post methods for doing this

There are, in other words, a huge number of mechanisms by which the political layer can control the administrative layer

The problem in these cases was not, however, an out-of-control bureaucracy exerting unaccountable power over citizens. The problem was a failure by plaintiffs to make use of the specific powers—the checks and balances—that the system made available to them. The failures of the early Trump administration to get its way cited in Project 2025 were largely due to the inexperience of that administration’s political appointees.

Removal of the property qualification for voting by most U.S. states in the 1820s vastly expanded the franchise to all white men. Politicians soon discovered, as they subsequently did in other new democracies, that the easiest way to get people to the polls was to bribe them—perhaps with a bottle of bourbon, a Christmas turkey, or a job in the post office. Thus began what was known as the patronage or spoils system, under which virtually every job in the civil service was given out by a politician in return for political support

The American patronage system was hugely corrupt, and provided opportunities for state capture by big business interests like the railroads that were spreading across the country. Congress did not want to give up its patronage powers, but eventually passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 that created a U.S. Civil Service Commission and established the principle of merit as a condition for hiring and promoting bureaucrats.

it was not until the time of the First World War that a majority of federal bureaucrats were appointed under the merit system.

The fundamental problem with a new Schedule F, as noted in my previous post, is that it will return the country to the period before the Pendleton Act, when political loyalty rather than merit, skill, or knowledge will be the primary criterion for government service

It took President Trump nearly four years (and 44 cabinet secretaries) to rid his administration of seasoned professionals and replace them with loyalists like Kash Patel at Defense or Jeffrey Clark at the Justice Department. This gives us a taste for the quality of officials who are likely to come in under a revived Schedule F. The doors to patronage, incompetence, and corruption will be thrown wide open.

Meanwhile, a disconnect seems to have occurred in our daily lives in Florida. The weekly forecasts, the hourly detail have seemingly become less accurate as the weather patterns have become more erratic.

That’s because the situation has fundamentally changed. This is not so much like a proverbial frog in a hot pot as a more insidious effect, in which we come to experience the stress of hurricane season more viscerally. Perhaps all of us will be hunkering down at some point, too exhausted to do anything else, whether we want to or not.

Now, with mini-droughts punctuated by torrential downpours, we prepare for flooding, overflowing sewers, loss of electricity and erosion. So we are already adrift as a result of climate change, unmoored without realizing it, when a hurricane looms large.

Encountering, then, meteorologists’ spaghetti models of a hurricane’s possible track, with their different futures, both help us make decisions and deepen a sense of anxiety. In one reality, the roof of our house blows off, and we are exposed to the elements. In another, just a hair’s breadth different, we’re standing, relieved in the yard, sun shining, just a day later.

We miss the gentle 3 p.m. rain of prior summers because it was part of our schedule, our routine, our understanding of and comfort with the rhythms of the seasons.

Apparently, my mind could not hold more than one extreme weather event at a time. So I write this from a hotel that could experience loss of electricity, high winds and flooding when Helene arrives. But to drive further would be dangerous, so I’m hunkering down, the window for decision making closed. I wonder sometimes if I should go back to Florida at all, which may feel like betrayal but also a relief.

I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear of what might happen tomorrow.

y object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.

On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript, I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “colossal humbug.”

On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 bc, and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”

It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.

What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech.

The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

But how does an uproar over a nonexistent problem (or even a marginally existent problem, should it ever prove so) defeat his cost-benefit analysis? Knowing the facts, hard as that work can be, remains basic to understanding and alleviating suffering.

His changes of mind appear to have left him unburdened by humility that he might have it wrong again.

Thousands of excited fans packed an arena to hear the two men—allies and possibly competitors one day for the Republican nomination—kick around the tenets of this new ideology: a leftist’s critique of American intervention abroad and of big business; a populist’s loathing of “elites”; a New Dealer’s zest for intervening in the economy; a libertarian’s obsession with free speech.

“Factual truth” is more vulnerable and thus more precious. It is “the very texture of the political realm”, she wrote. Indeed, she warned, “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11m people lived illegally in America in 2022, the most recent year for which it has data. Yet Mr Vance routinely insists that Ms Harris has admitted 25m people illegally.

Like claims of voter fraud or Haitian pet-eating, his number is both misleading and unfalsifiable. Can you prove there are no Martians stealing Americans’ Amazon packages off their front steps?

“Rational truth”, Hannah Arendt wrote, could rebound from the assault of political power. Banned in one era, Euclidean geometry might be rediscovered in another.

For Mr Vance, what binds this amalgam together appears to be illegal immigration. He blames it for everything from the price of eggs to the cost of housing, from the state of the schools to addiction, crime and the deficit

r Trump is teaching the next generation of politicians that such dispute is the short-cut to power. Do not be surprised if Mr Vance is less open to the possibility that Ms Harris got more votes should she, in the end, actually do s

West started his podcast, Philosophize This, in 2013. Podcasting, he realized, was the one “technological medium where there’s no barrier to entry.” He “just turned on a microphone and started talking.”

Within months, he was earning enough from donations to quit his warehouse job and pursue philosophy full-time. Now he has some 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and Philosophize This holds the No. 3 spot in the country for philosophy podcasts on Apple.

He treats the philosophical claims of any given thinker, however outdated, within the sense-making texture of their own time, oscillating adroitly between explanation and criticism and—this is rare—refusing to condescend from the privilege of the present

He is, as he once described the 10th-century Islamic scholar Al-Fārābī, “a peacemaker between different time periods.” All the episodes display the qualities that make West so compelling: unpretentious erudition, folksy delivery, subtle wit, and respect for a job well done.

“Academic philosophy is cloistered and impenetrable, but it needn’t be,” he told me. West, he said, “doesn’t preen or preach or teach; he just talks to you like a smart, curious adult.”

“He’s coming at this stuff from the perspective of a person actually searching for interesting answers, not as someone who is seeking academic legitimacy,” Shapiro said. “Too much philosophy is directed toward the other philosophers in the walled garden. He’s doing the opposite.”

I counted just six books on a shelf next to a pair of orange dumbbells: The Complete Essays of Montaigne; The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin; Richard Harland’s Literary Theory From Plato to Barthes; an anthology of feminist theory; And Yet, by Christopher Hitchens; and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The rest of his reading material lives on a Kindle. “If you look at the desktop of my computer, it’ll be a ton of tabs open,” he said, laughing. “Maybe it’s the clutter you’d be expecting.”

He just “always wanted to be wiser,” Alina said. “I mean, when he was younger, he literally Googled who was the wisest person.” (Here we can give Socrates his flowers once again.) “That’s how he got into philosophy.”

All of us are, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, inexorably the combination of our innate, inimitable selves and the circumstances in which we are embedded. “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.”

We are captive to the economic, racial, and technological limits of our times, just as we may be propelled forward in unforeseen ways by the winds of innovation.

Now he can design any life he likes. “I could be in Bora Bora right now,” he told me. “But I don’t want to be.” He wants to be in Puyallup with his family, in a place “where I can read and do my work and pace around and think about stuff.”

if this were any normal product we’d assume that people love it and are grateful to the companies that provide it to them — without charge, no less.

Turning to their own lives, 52 percent of the total sample say social media has benefited their lives, and 29 percent say it has hurt them personally.

Is it more like walkie-talkies, where hardly anyone wished they had never been invented? Or is it more like cigarettes, where smokers often say they enjoy smoking, but more than 71 percent of smokers (in one 2014 survey) regret ever starting?

So what does Gen Z really think about social media?

We recently collaborated on a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z adults (ages 18-27). We asked them online about their own social media use, about their views on the effects of social media on themselves and on society and about what kinds of reforms they’d support.

First, the number of hours spent on social media each day is astonishing. Over 60 percent of our respondents said they spend at least four hours a day, with 23 percent saying they spend seven or more hours each day using social media.

Second, our respondents recognize the harm that social media causes society, with 60 percent saying it has a negative impact (versus 32 percent who say it has a positive impact).

This is especially painful for adolescents, whose social networks have migrated, since the early 2010s, onto a few giant platforms. Nearly all American teenagers use social media regularly, and they spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on these platforms.

Although the percentage citing specific personal benefits was usually higher than those citing harms, this was less true for women and L.G.B.T.Q. respondents

For example, 37 percent of respondents said social media had a negative impact on their emotional health, with significantly more women (44 percent) than men (31 percent), and with more L.G.B.T.Q. (47 percent) than non-L.G.B.T.Q. respondents (35 percent) saying so. We have found this pattern — that social media disproportionately hurts young people from historically disadvantaged groups — in a wide array of surveys.

And even when more respondents cite more benefits than harms, that does not justify the unregulated distribution of a consumer product that is hurting — damaging, really — millions of children and young adults

Our survey shows that many Gen Z-ers see substantial dangers and costs from social media. A majority of them want better and safer platforms, and many don’t think these platforms are suitable for children

If any other consumer product was causing serious harm to more than one out of every 10 of its young users, there would be a tidal wave of state and federal legislation to ban or regulate it.

Turning to the ultimate test of regret versus gratitude: We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.”

Five items produced relatively low levels of regret: YouTube (15 percent), Netflix (17 percent), the internet itself (17 percent), messaging apps (19 percent) and the smartphone (21 percent).

We interpret these low numbers as indicating that Gen Z does not heavily regret the basic communication, storytelling and information-seeking functions of the internet.

responses were different for the main social media platforms that parents and Gen Z itself worry about most. Many more respondents wished these products had never been invented: Instagram (34 percent), Facebook (37 percent), Snapchat (43 percent), and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47 percent) and X/Twitter (50 percent).

We’re not just talking about sad feelings from FOMO or social comparison. We’re talking about a range of documented risks that affect heavy users, including sleep deprivation, body image distortion, depression, anxiety, exposure to content promoting suicide and eating disorders, sexual predation and sextortion, and “problematic use,” which is the term psychologists use to describe compulsive overuse that interferes with success in other areas of life.

Forty-five percent of Gen Z-ers report that they “would not or will not allow my child to have a smartphone before reaching high school age (i.e. about 14 years old)”

57 percent support the idea that parents should restrict their child’s access to smartphones before that age

Although only 36 percent support social media bans for those under the age of 16, 69 percent support a law requiring social media companies to develop a child-safe option for users under 18.

This high level of support is true across race, gender, social class and sexual orientatio

it has important implications for the House of Representatives, which is considering just such a bill, the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill would, among other things, disable addictive product features, require tech companies to offer young users the option to use non-personalized algorithmic feeds and mandate that platforms default to the safest settings possible for accounts believed to be held by minors.

imagine if walkie-talkies were harming millions of young people. Imagine if more than a third of young people wished that walkie-talkies didn’t exist, yet still felt compelled to use them for five hours every day.

We’d insist that the manufacturers make their products safer and less addictive for kids. Social media companies must be held to the same standard: Either fix their products to ensure the safety of young users or stop providing them to children altogether.