Is the truth a lie?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good to see you again, as always, my friend.

Chris Scott, good to see you as well. How's the world on your side of the ocean?

Scott The State of the Union is very strong. It's incredibly strong. The problem is, though, that there's an immigration crisis. I'm afraid that if I leave my house, I'll come back and there'll be two Guatemalan families that have just moved in. They're pouring over. The caravans are pouring over, unless we get the wall.

Chris But, you know, it's interesting. So we won't talk too much. Well, I don't know where this conversation will go.

Scott For those who don't know me, that was... All incredibly facetious. There is no immigration crisis in the United States. Immigration is like a 27-year low.

Chris So you say. So you say. You know, it must be so exhausting to be American in this political moment because, you know, as soon as... As soon as it looks like there might be some dampening of the rhetoric and some kind of return to sensible compromise on things like border security and that issue just doesn't look like it's going to work as well for the president in the State of the Union, talking up abortion and amping up That social division, I mean, it's just, you know, you got to be impressed with the guy. I mean, the capacity to stoke controversy. Has there ever been a more controversial American president? I mean, but it's inexhaustible. How does a person who so clearly looks physically out of shape be capable of generating such inexhaustible controversy in society? You've got to kind of take your hat off to the man and just say, wow. I wasn't ready to pivot to abortion, but too late, we're there.

Scott And the Democrats, it's interesting because... Donald Trump's best re-elect chance are the Democrats, right? So you come out and you've got a majority. People are really feeling anxious about the Trump presidency and they speak in the midterms. And then you lead off with late term abortion, which is 25% of this country believes there should be no abortions at all. 25% believes in abortion on demand. 50% believe So the first is a Jesuit priest. He gets up and says, you know, life begins at conception and argues very rhetorically, forcefully and intelligently for that. His colleague, a liberal Protestant, steps up and says, you know, my colleague and I are friends, and I respect him, but I disagree. Life begins at birth, and he offers an alternative perspective. Well, there's an Episcopal priest in the third chair who's been kind of hitting his flask throughout the night, and when it's his turn, he gets up and says, look, I don't know what the hell these guys are talking about.

We all know life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies. So aside from that kind of stuff, it's just a crazy... And then we're going to ban meat. The Democrats are going to ban meat and air travel and all this kind of... The Green New Deal.

Chris Yeah, so it's interesting because all this kind of stuff, in a way, does relate to my latest map, which we'll get to talking about.

Scott Which I am a fan.

Chris You liked that, did you? I liked it a lot. I grappled with it for a while. I mean, the title of the essay is, Is the Truth a Lie? And we'll get into maybe the details of sort of what we were thinking about there, but specifically on abortion, on immigration, on all these issues. You know, something that I feel quite strongly is that within a democracy, the truth, whatever that is, it's going to look really complex. The truth is going to be a very complex, messy, sort of difficult to disentangle object in our reality. And so you can kind of, if you accept that, you can very quickly spot when somebody's not talking truth. Thanks for watching. circumstances in which a mother or an expectant mother or a family are contemplating a late-term abortion. I mean, this isn't about, oh, I want to commit infanticide. It's more about, I'm in this awful circumstance where I maybe need to choose between my own life and giving birth. Every single one of these cases is a complex tragedy.

Scott Yeah, how the left argues for that is not in terms of complexity, but in terms of rights language. So it's like, so you're forced to push this. When you use rights language in abstract terms, you're forced to sort of... To simplify, yeah, because rights are absolute, right? Exactly, and so it doesn't matter the, you know, the... And it's interesting, because do you know Rawls' Veil of Ignorance? The idea is John Rawls, the great 20th century liberal democratic theorist at Harvard saying like, basically, you should, when you're making any public policy, you should be behind a veil of ignorance.

Chris Yeah, pretend that you don't know what side of that issue you might wind up being on.

Scott So if you're doing, like, fracking laws, you should not know whether you're the person in whose yard they're fracking, or adjacent to the yard they're fracking, or you're making the profits from the fracking.

Chris Why on earth was that the example that your head... Thanks for watching.

Scott You know, wherever the chips fell. Or there's a British thinker, I forget. His version of this is, you can cut the pie however you want as long as I take the first slice. Same kind of idea. So I heard a conservative thinker using Rawls saying, well, I mean, come on, with a veil of ignorance, right? All of us would not want to be late-term aborted. I'm thinking it's the absolute rights versus the absolute Rawlsian. So like you're kind of, I mean, it's just these things, these debates become almost inane at that level of abstraction.

Chris I guess there's some, so this is very interesting, this issue, this question of so much of our... And so that's interesting that, you know, does that actually, does that language, does that frame make it harder for us to appreciate and explore the real complexity of truths? Because to assert a right is basically to say that, you know, This interest or this way of looking at the situation overrides all other interests or all other complexities that you might bring into this story. And therefore, end of discussion. There's no need to have a conversation.

Scott And we tend to look at it as a zero-sum game. So you look at like gun control in the United States. Most NRA members are for a lot of sensible restrictions that are hard to get past. But the problem is the advocates, like the NRA, the sort of political machination, the political machination, I was gonna say machine again, but the big bureaucratic people group that lives in Washington and hangs out with congresspeople all day, they look at it like, well, any move in the direction of our lobbying opponents is like we lost one, they gained one. And so you can't, I'm surprised we even got bump stocks You know, the thing that turns a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon by sort of vibrating it quickly against your shoulder while you're pulling the trigger. I mean, that, I mean, that should have been a layup, but like that's,

again, because it's viewed in this absolute, if I give a little bit in the interpretation of this right, then my opponents gain in this zero-sum game, you know, that I'm a loser in this confrontation. And it's, you know, it's not a helpful frame for good public policy. But it's great for cable news, though.

Chris But I think in all that, what you really need to do for our listeners is explain what a layup is, because I'm not sure if all of us know.

Scott Oh, it's like in basketball, you know, when you're running up and it's like you're just, you know, you're like three feet from the basket and you just sort of jump up in the air and just gently throw the ball towards the hoop and it either bounces in or swishes in and it's an easy layup. It's a shot that should not be very missable.

Chris And yet, and yet. So, you know, what's interesting is, so I start to wonder if all this stuff is related, right? The divisiveness in our public debates, the kind of ubiquity of rights language in our attempt to win these debates. And this phenomenon of whether you call it fake news or what, but the willingness to accept not only simple truths but simple lies as ways to advance your agenda or advance your perspective in society. And so I was kind of thinking about that in the last couple of weeks and in writing this essay, Is the Truth a Lie? And as I was reflecting on this, I was thinking about the time that I had lived in China. And one of the interesting things about living in an authoritarian state is that all of the engines of producing truth In society are kind of lined up to drive in the same direction.

Scott Is that scary, by the way? At what point do you get off the plane and you're going to and you owned a business there, right? At what point are you like, oh, I'm in an authoritarian state. All right. Like I'm exiting the liberal democratic norm. I have norms and landscape I'm accustomed to. And now I am in an authoritarian state. I mean, that's like what's the daily anxiety increase like in an authoritarian state?

Chris So, you know, so that realization in China happens pretty quickly because as a foreigner, if you're doing anything more than staying in a hotel for a period of time, you need to register at the local 派出所, which is basically, how would you translate that? It's like the district security office. If you read the fine print, you're obligated to do that within 24 hours of arrival. If you stay in a hotel, But if you stay in a hotel, the hotel does that automatically. But if you're staying in a residence or something like that, then you register. And so you discover pretty quickly that there's a level of the necessity to give up your privacy within that society. And then the other time that you very quickly encounter the truth that you're in an authoritarian state, if you ever have an encounter with the police. And you know, there's something about, maybe you see it in television programs, or if we've ever been pulled over by the cops for speeding, not that I ever have, but there's this sense of, I think, injustice that we often feel, and power that we feel.

When the state's authorities get in our way, right? You know, I've got rights and you've got to follow procedure and all these different things. Why are you pulling me over? Whereas when you encounter the police in China, you realize that you're completely naked. And as a foreigner, I mean, if you just give them trouble, they could just decide to revoke your visa and away you go.

Scott But if you're black from America, you're like, oh, just like mom used to make, this is just like home. Here we go. I'm prepared for this.

Chris Oh my goodness. So how black people are treated in China is another issue. And there's a long conversation to have there. And I guess it kind of relates to so much social progress happens through contestation. And when all of the engines of truth are kind of lined up on one side, there's less contestation. There's less... Thank you very much. But, you know, what are the engines of truth and kind of the search for truth in society?

Scott Can we just unpack that? Penalty to the speed of cultural development. Because we did a podcast. It was early on. It might have been our first episode. I don't know. In China, we were talking about the devos crowd and the affinity for Chinese efficiency socioeconomically. Because I'm just thinking in terms of, we're talking about oversimplifying and the danger of it, and I'm oversimplifying. But it's almost like, okay, for the kind of cultural progress you're talking about, and I would assume we're talking about progress in terms of openness, freedoms, and things like that. The contesting might slow down other things we like, but in the interest of giving people space... And for a laboratory that helps discover the truth. Now, you could create more uniformity, which might make certain policy objectives more efficient to achieve, but the cost is a certain kind of development of the human society.

Chris So, you know, very, very simple example we can probably all lie down to right now. Think of the Me Too movement over the last year and how the very public unveiling of cases, you know, prominent people who've engaged in sexual discrimination, harassment, rape. Thank you very much. Who is running for office in the 2018 midterms and was elected in the Democratic side? Look at who is running for the 2020 presidency in the US. Look at conversations that are happening across the corporate world and the advanced liberal democracy about gender, about gender relations. The MeToo movement has so quickly become a movement. contrast that to in China, where there is some of that, but it is a far quieter thing. And given that the state has authority over the media and authority over... David Pryor I'm sure that men being men and put in positions of hierarchy and authority and situations where there's giant disparity between their power and the power of the women around them, that there is just rampant sexual abuse taking place within that hierarchy. Don't hear very much about it. David Plylar Rapid and deep exploration that's happening in the United States, here in the UK, about men and women in the workplace and how to negotiate that. I suspect that a far less rapid mutation of gender relations is taking place within the Chinese context. It's sort of like water. I mean, if you raise the temperature and the molecules are moving faster, the reactions happen faster.

In China, There is a Just a strong conservative agenda to say, whoa, okay, you know, that could be a rapid reaction. Let's turn the temperature down until, you know, we who have the monopoly on power can choose like the direction that this reaction is going, what might some of the unintended consequences of it be. And so I think that you take that one example and you multiply it across the whole universe of possible contests taking place in society. And the sum difference is that, yeah, the cultural reactions do maybe happen.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting because if you're a sort of modern Protestant, you look at the Catholic Church and say, well, their biggest hang-up or their biggest liability is they're really slow to change. And then if you're a sort of devoted Roman Catholic, you'd say our biggest virtue is that we're slow to change, right? Where you think, because that sort of, you know, Heraclitus, you know, everything, you don't step in the same river twice, everything, more movement, the more change you get, more dynamism. The kind of reaction that would be, well, China would be like, well, we'll get this sorted out in two or three hundred years. You know, like, you kind of, right? I mean, that's the other side of the coin. And that's not what, I mean, I tend to be on the, with you, well, this is why we're both advocates of liberal democracy, right? That a certain kind of... Right. And so that's why I think that, for example, kind of at a societal level...

Chris Having conservative religious institutions within fast-changing liberal cultures is probably a good thing because it complexifies the truth. It forces challenging conversations to take place before society can kind of reach an ultimate groupthink and say, no, this is what's right and that's what's wrong. And so actually, that's a good extension into some of the questions that I've been grappling with recently. Let's kind of do a stock take on how healthy is the contest for truth in advanced liberal democracy? Because on the one hand, you can just look at all the divisiveness in society. There must be an extremely healthy contest for truth. Then you might say, whoa, actually, there's something kind of sick happening here because the truth, what divides us isn't some sort of different perspectives on a complicated truth. What divides us is that we've both got separate, simple truths. And so why is it that the truth is becoming such a simple thing within democratic society? I think that's a really important question for us to sit with.

Scott Yeah, I feel like we've talked about this a little bit in one of the earlier episodes, but I'll bring it back up. Michael Polanyi, who was a philosopher of science, and it kind of came up in the mid-20th century in Germany, was Jewish, emigrated, I think, before things got really bad in the Third Reich. But he was... He realized, his advisor, he got the answer right, it was in biochemistry, but his work was wrong. Like, he knew what he was doing was right, but he couldn't, it took him a while to prove it, right? And so, he was talking about, he realized at that point how subjective science is, right? That we have this objective view of science, but it's really more subjective, or at least the scientists are fully subjective, as fully subjective as anybody else, right? Like, why do you study flowers and not rocks and waters?

Even when you're choosing fields of study, there's subjectivity. So he eventually becomes a philosopher of science, moves to England, and I think his most famous book is called Personal Knowledge, but he wrote numerous books. And he had this conception that rather than objective, subjective truth, Some people would say, yeah, have fruit and meat, Hawaiian pizza, right? That's something that it would be very difficult to litigate in what he would think is public truth.

Chris He says- Well, if I can just interrupt you there, I think what Polanyi, he would be arguing with you in your definitions of what are fruits and vegetables.

Scott That's true, this is true.

Chris He'd be like, oh, you're trapped, you scientists, you're trapped in a subjective lens.

Scott You know, almost nothing we call a nut is really a nut. Like the hazelnut, the chestnut, almost everything else is not a nut.

Chris I can't remember who the scientist was, what was his name, but he spent his whole life studying fish, and the ultimate conclusion of a lifetime of study, scientifically studying fish, was that there's no such thing as a fish, that the differences between species and fish are larger than, say, between bumblebees and blue jays. And they both fly, but they're very different. And we've made this mistake within our science and within our culture of thinking that everything that swims in water is a fish. But in fact, that was a completely different, I'm sorry, a complete digression.

Scott My point is... If Aristotle could be alive today, he would love it, because he's like, this is what he lived for. He'd have so many more taxonomical resources. But yeah, like Polanyi basically says, when you have... In humanities, too, we do this. Like, well, if somebody writes a biography of Winston Churchill or somebody does a political science thesis on the interpretation of Aristotle's politics, we peer review and say, yeah, this deserves to be in the contest. It's moved from subjective opinion to a sort of... © transcript Emily Beynon But I think what he would say is with our siloing of cable news and various web sources and stuff, that we get these really big private truth silos, right? So really, nobody has to, or very seldom in a place like the United States, does something ever get to public truth and public policy.

So I think that ends it.

Chris The other thing that worries me is that, you know, when you think about sort of the subjective frames that we work in and, you know, religion, you know, sort of organized religion looks at the world in a certain way, political class, the world in a certain way. And I think, you know, that's also part of the intent within Thank you very much.

Scott And it can only be built from the ground up. There's this old parable or myth or story about this Indian king who brings an elephant into the court and has several blind men say, what's the elephant like? And one touches the leg and says it's like a tree trunk. Another touches the... Faith and doubt are the friends of the truth, right? Believing and doubting, right? It's certainty, a certain kind of false certainty that requires the view of that mythical king that gets you to nihilism, right? When you realize that there's only this kind of messy interaction of believing and doubting on a public scale, that actually we come to truth.

Chris So let's take the elephant metaphor. And so we've got...

But the metaphor I kind of imagined, so a bunch of people feeling it, and they're all sort of sharing, oh, I feel this, I feel that, this is part of the truth, and this is part of the truth. And I guess the imagined metaphor is that, well, if we all kind of put our pieces of what we see and feel together, then we collectively get some reasonable approximation of, okay, this is what's real. The question is, what happens if... Everybody's doing that, but what happens if the perspectives of some people are weighted way more heavily than others? How does that skew our overall picture of things? If all of the people who are feeling the trunk or the ears are really listened in society, then what is this thing? And so, you know, to give context, so in the China example, for example, Whatever anybody is seeing or feeling is contained by this rule that it's ultimately got to support public order and political order. Order is the primary virtue, the primary value that has overriding importance over any other considerations. You could argue that something similar is happening within Thank you very much.

Specific cases where you can see how the introduction of management thinking and economic thinking into spheres of society who are responsible for producing pieces of the truth tends to just duplicate what the people who are feeling the trunk and feeling the ears. have already shown us. And so the most recent case that I've been sort of researching and working out is the academy, higher education, and how the academy looks at immigration.

Scott And I think it's really... And this is interesting for our listeners, too, who might not know a lot about your bio. You kind of live in a couple worlds, right? Because you spend some of your time in doing continuing ed stuff in the context of a very established academic... But even there, you're working with business people often in the academy, and you do a lot of work in the private sector. So you sort of flip back and forth between the place where the market rightly probably should have a degree of weight and one where the norms maybe should be different.

Chris Yeah, I like to put on whatever hat makes me look best for the audience that I'm addressing.

Scott Whatever makes you look slimming.

Chris Is it supposed to be pinstripes?

Scott Yeah, horizontal stripes generally make you look wider.

Chris When have you ever seen a shirt with horizontal stripes?

Scott I have two sweaters with horizontal stripes.

Chris Okay, well, I believe that you do. Sweaters, yeah, but have you ever worn it like a business shirt?

Scott No.

Chris Like a button shirt with a horizontal shirt? They don't exist.

Scott They don't exist? That's very interesting.

Chris No, they don't exist. Maybe we should start that business.

Scott The line. For Svelte people that want to look bigger.

Chris We'll do some kind of crowdfunding campaign and see if people really want it, I can hook us up.

Scott Guys that want to look bigger from the chest up, it would be good.

Chris Okay, so that'll be our target market.

Scott There you go.

Chris There you go. You know, we'll spend a hundred bucks on Google AdWords or something and see if... Just see if we have... I'll bet like within a week somebody's going to pick that up and run with it. I mean, power to them. So you're right. So I do kind of move around different spheres. And, you know, but I thought this would be an interesting case, how the Academy talks about immigration. One, because, you know, at least... In theory, the academy of universities are meant to be the core independent truth-generating engine of society. That's your role in society. Go look for truth wherever you can find it. And on the other hand, immigration, because this is the most divisive issue across the advanced liberal democracies today. And so when you look at the intersection of those two things, it's really interesting to see that what the academy has been doing sort of as a sector has been taking, you know, very clearly one side of the immigration debate, which is immigration is a good thing, you know, the global circulation of brains is a great thing, ideas and knowledge are completely blind, and so the more diversity we can put together, The argument makes total sense, but what I get...

What I get concerned about is that universities are also heavily self-interested. 30, 40 years ago in the US, certainly in the UK, Canada, the university sector was largely funded by the state, public funding. And so the idea was, look, you don't need to go chase for money. You're a cost center for society. That ensures your independence. So go and do whatever you want to do. Fast forward to today, and there's a very different view. Higher education isn't just a public good, it's a private benefit. And so the view is that the people that get the degrees, the students, should be paying the majority of the costs. So tuition fees have gone way up, public funding has gone way down. And one of the ways that the whole higher education sector, especially in the Anglosphere, like Australia, Canada, United States, UK, One of the ways that they've made up for the withdrawal of state funding is to attract more and more foreign students, international students who pay big fat

tuition fees to study abroad, which is all fine, which is all good, except when you recognize that... So the rapid expansion of foreign students within higher education, kind of the Anglosphere countries... Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Scott National born citizens aren't thrilled about doing. And so then you don't have those same opportunities out in the hinterlands, right? When you're out in the sort of less urbanized metro developed areas, you don't, there's not this. So you get one group of, I mean, Hillary Clinton won one sixth of the counties in the United States, these little municipalities, you know, one sixth, right? That one sixth of the counties generated something like 67% of the GDP of the country. So, wow. So talk about skew. And they've got a huge interest in the kind of immigration policies you're talking about.

Chris So, you know, so I'm personally, like, I'm, you know, well, on public record, I've published books on this. I'm pretty radically pro-immigration.

Scott But I also have kind of the self-awareness to recognize... Are you pretty radically or strongly radically?

Chris I don't know. I kind of gave myself a weasel room.

Scott I'm still thinking about it. One to five, moderately.

Chris Well, yeah, we'll get into that later. But, you know, I also recognize that, you know, what I'm seeing is the economic truth, that there is such a strong and obvious argument in the big picture, and maybe local pockets of economic losses, sure, but in the big picture, systemically, the economic value of freer migration is just so obvious to me. But, you know, that's just one piece of what should be an enormously complex societal truth. I mean, what is the moral truth here? And what is the cultural truth? What is the psychological truth? What is the truth about the capacity of societies and of individuals to accommodate diversity and to integrate versus the need for some kind of homogeneity in order to have a predictable society? I mean, Tower of Babel in the Bible, right, was sort of an argument that there is some sort of upper limit to...

The capacity of society to deal with heterogeneity before it just breaks down. So given that immigration really should be such a complex and contested truth, I actually, when I step back and think about it, I find it almost like a dereliction of duty that Universities UK, which is the lobbying organization that represents, that speaks publicly on behalf of all the universities in the UK, for example. And similar bodies in the US and Australia come out publicly say, immigration is a good thing. Here's the economic argument why. I look at that and I really start to fear, have the economic logics to which you, because of how society funds higher education, are now so shackled, have they affected your ability to actually contribute other aspects of the truth to this conversation that is dividing society? And if all you're doing is just mirroring, reflecting strong and valid arguments, but that are already being made by, say, the private sector, then are you also in a way

harming society's capacity to explore complex truths by making sort of one side of the argument so hegemonic that if you don't share that argument, you kind of feel like there's no place in the public realm? To voice not alternatives to that truth, but to voice other aspects that aren't being spoken about and amplified and considered enough.

Scott Yeah, and I feel like... That was a long monologue. No, I like that. I think what you're getting at here, there's this sort of reductionism, right? There's this temptation constantly to reductionism. So if you're the market, right, you want to reduce everything to market analysis and have that lens. The adage, right, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And, you know, you have, interestingly, too, you have this kind of reductive nature of looking at things. For populists on the right, you have a kind of ethnography lens, right? Like, well, you know, we got to look at, you know, real America, the forgotten people, right? That pairs up with a left-wing interest, right? Like, the sort of multicultural postmodernism, there's only, there's not ethics, there's Buddhist ethics, feminist ethics, South Asian ethics, like all these, you know, everything is pushing towards silos, right? Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, wrote that book, Local Knowledge. Well, really, is there anything, when we're honest, if you're reflective, worse than local knowledge? What's the worst thing that a colleague can say to you, right? They come up to you and say, let me tell you about this dream I had last night. And you're just saying, oh my God, I wanna kill myself, because they're gonna be like, I was in a factory, and I was like...

Unless they're going to say something interesting like, the dream, I was having sex with my mother and I really think it means I want to have sex with my girlfriend, or something like that. Unless they have some Freudian interpretation, if they're just recounting a dream they had, you're like, kill me, get me out of this conversation. And yet, very often, I think with this sort of- Maybe I have better dreams than you, I'm sorry to just- Exactly.

Chris But I have a completely different, wow.

Scott I had a dream I met an author last night and I wanted him to sign books that I liked of his. It was very exciting.

Chris I had a dream with Patrick Stewart a couple of years ago. It was very strange.

Scott Were you number one? No, but you know what I mean? This is, whether it's for market interest, whether it's for populist right-wing or sort of fashionable left-wing interest, there seems to be this desire to get everything to private truth, as Paul Young would say, as opposed to public truth. And for this public truth, we need a bunch of people, as you're saying in this map, that acknowledge That their lens is different and yet an essential part of the pie, as are others, right? So you have to have this love for yourself and also this openness to people that come at the truth from a different angle than your piece.

Chris So this is why everybody needs to listen to our podcast, I think. Exactly. Because, you know, what... And what really got me started exploring this whole question of how well are society's different truth engines doing at giving society a complex truth? The trope, the thing people repeat. So what are we going to do? Oh, well, we need more critical thinking in school. As if somehow that is the thing that's missing. Our inability to put another couple of hours each term for kids on how to dissect the logic of an argument is responsible for the crisis of truth that society finds itself in. And every time I hear somebody advocate critical thinking skills, I get sent right back to my years living in Beijing, which hammered home for me that the capacity to think critically, it's not just an individual capacity.

It's a property of the system. And is the system set up To engender a contest over truth, or is it set up to shut that contest down? And that is going to so overdetermine whatever impact illogic courses people took in elementary school. And so hopefully that's somehow part of what we're doing right now, is to try to stimulate and open up a much wider exploration of the situation that we are in. Because there are no easy fixes. There's only, I think, a very tough conscientious working with one another to kind of understanding. What society we have built, and if we want to change some aspects of it, then how do we make those changes? And the first step, I think, is being conscious of how we got to where we are today.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting, and the significance of this. There's a retired philosopher from Princeton, Harry Frankfurt, who wrote a book that was very famous, made the rounds everywhere, called On Bullshit. And it's all about the nature of bullshitting, and when you're talking and you're not really caring whether you're, what you're saying.

Chris I don't need to read that book.

Scott Yeah, exactly. Anybody in Western culture has to do it so much when you have to talk out of your depth. Then he wrote a follow-up, a short monograph called On the Truth. And in the conclusion, he talks about how in human development, when we learn early on that the world is not us, that we learn where we end and the world begins, we learn that we can't just control other people, and that that's a really important human developmental lesson, that there are things outside our control, our subjectivity, our identity. And he says, and this is the conclusion, thus our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of and depends integrally on our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves. In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control if there were no such facts or truths.

If the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like it or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world stubbornly independent, a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact and truth, that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities. How then can we fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth? We cannot.

Chris Is that seriously how the book ends?

Scott That's the end of the book. I mean, he's making this argument for human identity.

Chris He doesn't let you off lightly, does he?

Scott But that's it. You think there's a cost to living in the fake news, truth, silo society. Things like love, understanding, human connection, these things, the less we have a society that cultivates and appreciates the value of fact, reality, and truth, the less we can be our real selves.

Chris Yeah, the whole human experience becomes somehow thinner.

Scott Yeah.

Chris I think. Yeah. He should have ended the book that way. Because that paragraph was like, dude, who was your editor? It's so powerful.

Scott I love it. I love it.

Chris It's like, oh, you're retired. Put it in the show notes. I've got to read that a couple more times. Mic drop. Yeah. But you've got to have, imagine, I'm trying to imagine, what is the audience of people with which you could say that paragraph and drop the mic? Honestly, the first thing that I would do after the mic drop is turn to my left and turn to my right. Are you with me? Are you with me? It's like, what are you asking me to do? On a lighter note, and then I think we need to wrap up. But on a lighter note, I remember why I was thinking, why I dreamt about Patrick Stewart. Because he was here in London on a show. He was promoting, I forget what, the UK version of doing the late night talk show circuit, right? And he was telling the story of when he was, you know, first sort of started filming Star Trek The Next Generation as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

And apparently the original thinking was that Jean-Luc Picard should speak with a French accent. And so he said, so would you like to hear what it'd be like? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We want to hear Jean-Luc Picard with a French accent. He says, space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Entreprise. It's good that they asked that one.

Scott You're never going to get into space.

Chris It's not space.

Scott And let's stop at the first planet with this stinky cheese.

Chris And good wine, of course.

Scott Well, my friend, keep pursuing the truth, as will I, and we will talk again next week.

Chris We've got so much work to do. That's what I realized from this conversation.

Scott To love and to work. That is what Freud says is maturation, right? So it's Valentine's Day, we're working, now we'll love. To love and to work.

Chris Put it in the show notes.

Scott Absolutely.

Chris Take care, my friend.