Truth isn’t the problem, it’s the truths

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, hello, sir. Scott, it's been too long. It has. Apologies to our listeners. I was on vacation a little bit. You've been traveling and working on your, I was going to say magnum opus, but it's really a minimum specificus opus. You're giving a TED Talk, which is this incredible thing in our culture. Now you're stressing me out. Yeah, but it's a weird thing to do, right? It's cool, and it's awesome, and you're in this place with all these interesting, cool people, and yet you've got to sort of distill something into 20 minutes. It's like this awesome experience, and yet on the other side of it, it probably feels like a really peculiar experience.

Chris Well, I mean, I like what you were saying earlier, kind of while we were still off air, that, you know, there's something similar to your experience of preparing a sermon each week in that, you know, you've got all these ideas swimming around in your head and, you know, you want to honor the complexity. But if you try to communicate it all, then the meaning that you want people to take away is easily lost. And so you need to in some ways simplify in order to be effective. And therefore you end up in yourself an awkward relationship with the truth where, as you put it, you preach a heresy each week.

Scott Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you say something that seems unbalanced. And this is where I think the Hegelian stuff helps me in that, like, if truth is in the contradictions, they're not problems so much as prisms and invitations. Well, this thing which seems unbalanced really gives way to something fuller. And so, you know, actually, somehow the more particular and specific will ultimately contribute to a picture of the whole that you can't do in any given moment. At least I hope that. I hope Adorno's not right, where he says, like, Hegel says, right, the truth is the whole, and I think Adorno says the whole is a myth. So if Adorno's right, then, you know, I want to pack up and go home, but... So I'm just going to say Adorno's wrong.

Chris And, you know, like me being me, you know, never want to shy away from an intellectual challenge. So, you know, rather than accept their invitation to talk about, you know, some of the topics that I've researched and written and talked a lot about over the last few years, I, you know, we kind of had a conversation which went like, well, you know, can we do something new? Because that would be more interesting for me. And so we mutually decided, yeah, well, you know, why don't you get up on stage and give us your answer to the crisis of truth in our society today and social media and fake news and all of that. And I thought, yeah, okay, that's, you know, that's a good summer project.

Scott Yeah, well, it's timely. I mean, this is the thing that's great about that, right? It's timely. And I mean, it's like why we do this podcast, right? I mean, some of it is like a combination of like the 500,000 feet above and yet connected to things that are very much on the ground. That's sort of like your DNA and who you are. And so it's like a, I mean, that's in your bones, you know, like there's no surprise that you would like to do that.

Chris Yeah, I guess that's right. And, you know, I like what you say, kind of, you know, something Hegelian about, you know, the truth being in the contradiction. And I feel like that was just my bias going into it is, well, okay, if I'm going to kind of explore the question of just what's going wrong in society and what is this Pandora's box that social media has opened up for us, where my mind immediately went is, you know, I just think it's more interesting to explore the counterintuitive, which is that actually all this stuff is a good thing. That social media and the transition from a mass media to a social media age is fundamentally a good thing. And so to explore what is the truth of that? Where is the truth in that contrarian view? And I think that I got to really interesting, just I guess for myself, some realizations about How much we are growing, how much more self-aware we have the opportunity to become as a society about what our relationship with truth has been and is and could be as a result of the advent of social media.

And so that's where my headspace is at at the moment. Well, I don't know. You're one of the two people in the world or three who have seen my kind of latest draft on it. I don't know, do you think, am I succeeding at my project?

Scott Yeah, well, I think it's interesting because you talk about that, there's this one line you say that I love, you say like, I don't blame the medium, I don't blame the lies, I blame our truths. And I was thinking about that because It took me to this. Harry Frankfurt, who wrote that great little book on bullshit, then he followed up with a monograph called On the Truth. Talks about truth possesses an instrumental value when it's taken in separate pieces. Like the individual truths are useful, right, for certain things like, you know, for engineering or for elasticity of materials or, you know, anybody. So he talks about the difference between how you can... You could be an engineer or a physician and use a truth to heal a patient or strengthen a bridge and not care about factuality in general or the truth in general in that moment or in general. But he thinks everybody can do this. Everybody can be thinking about, okay, I could pull out this...

To cover up the truth or a specific fact to obscure what's actual factuality. And I think that's part of what you're talking about. People sense that in this media age, oftentimes things are oversimplified. Truth becomes something that we use, not something that we think is a higher good, like the good or the beautiful, bigger than ourselves. And so it's often what we say is the truth. So that's really interesting because

Chris You know, you talk about, you know, we say something and there's an element of truthiness to it. And so one of the things I spent a lot of time reflecting upon in terms of, you know, how has social media been helpful is, I think, in exposing, I don't know how to say this, exposing what happens when we simplify the truth. And saying that actually, you know, our practice of simplifying the truth is really a practice from the mass media age. I mean, that was when, I mean, we've been sort of, humanity's been sort of twisting truth for our purposes sort of ever since, I guess, you know, cave people days. But it was in the age of mass media. In the industrial age, when like so many other things, we turned that craft into an industry and manufacturing truth, right? Like public relations, propaganda, advertising. Truth became something cheap and plentiful. And there are small examples of that, like cigarettes are slimming. And there are big examples of that, like globalization is a good thing. And each of those is basically taking, like, you know, there is probably some big truth in there or some possible aspect of truth. I mean, having a practice of smoking cigarettes maybe means that you don't eat as well. Anyway, not to go down that rabbit hole. But what happens when we simplify truth, you know, every time we reduce the full truth into something simpler, we are committing a lie of omission, right?

And then this is what's interesting about social media, is that in the mass media age, those omissions weren't a problem. Because everything we omitted from the broadcast was voiceless and powerless, right? It had no voice, so it had no reality. But in the social media age, each of those omissions finds a voice. Each of those omissions is someone's chance to gain followers, to gain legitimacy by calling it out and to decide that whatever the big message is isn't their truth. And so I think that what social media has really helped to expose is how these simple truths that we transact in can be self-defeating. That because we are willing to kind of simplify the truth, we make it possible for everyone who doesn't want to share in it to have their own contrary truthiness. Because you didn't say that, you know, yeah, immigration is a good thing, but you really look at it, there are all these consequences and all these questions that just haven't been considered, that haven't been heard. And that's my truth.

Scott Yeah, there's going to be stuff. There's downsides, big downsides. This is what you talk about in the age of discovery, right? The challenges of how do you make all these gains in the aggregate, right? Actual gains for more particular people. And so you can say to people, this is great for everybody, really. Well, on the aggregate, probably, but that everybody includes people. What do they say?

Chris People for whom it isn't a great thing.

Scott Right. If your neighbor lost their job, it's a recession. If you lost your job, it's a depression. I mean, that kind of, I mean, I think that's the, it's interesting too that that example use of globalization is great. And this guy I interviewed, Michael Lynch, wrote this book, Know It All Society, and he talks about, he actually says, you know, what if we use instead of emoticons, like, you know, smiley face, poop emoji, whatever, if we replaced it in social media, like with, about news and everything, you know, these news stories we see in our Facebook or Twitter feeds, Hey, he thought they just thought it was I was cute and naive. And then he saw on a deeper level what they understood is if we did that, those categories would just become new emojis like need more rat rat justified by the evidence, not justified by the evidence or need more information would just become like not like or I don't care. So they wouldn't. It just talks about how, you know, certain ethical theorists think that ethics are really just emotive expressions like. Thanks for watching.

Wow, this evidentially, if you weigh all the things, is true with a capital T. We're saying, I like it, yay team, or I don't like it, or boo to that team, or I don't care. It doesn't make me feel any particular way. And so I think part of the pushback on something like globalization is a good thing. And you're saying when you don't qualify, somebody feels marginalized by that truth. And with counterfactuals or things like that, And I think that, you know, it's... I think that we...

Chris We probably developed that habit much earlier than the social media age, which is to say that those who possess truth are important, have power, that it's possible to possess truth. I mean, we did it to ourselves through decades. You put people up You dress them up, you put them on a stage, you give them a microphone, you give them a column, and we say, what those people say is true, and power flows to those messengers. And so now, suddenly, we all have access to the microphone, to be a newspaper column, to be a television station, and we're all implementing the model that we've learned, which is that here, I get it. I get this point about, you know, the emoticons. So really what happened is, you know, we grew up on the idea that truth is something that gets sold, not something that you search for. And now we all have the mechanisms to sell it. And so we're all doing it. What's interesting is, you know, you think about, you know, sort of the philosophical truth like beauty and the good and these ideals that we aim for. And I think that the philosophical role of truth is to be something that brings us together. Yep.

Then there's no common project to bring us together anymore in that search. And ironically, this thing that was supposed to bring us together, now it divides us. I have my truth and you have yours. And the fact that now everyone has the opportunity to sell their truth just means that we've become that much more divided.

Scott This is exactly, that's the conclusion of Harry Frankfurt's book on the truth. He talks about how we only learn who we are and that we're limited by obstacles that come up against us in childhood and through maturation, you know, all the way from infancy into adulthood. He says, thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of and depends intricately on It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact and truth, that we come both to recognize ourselves as being distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our 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 I love that, and I would love to have that conversation with Michael. My immediate experience, preparing a TED Talk and going to the reviewers, they would just look at that and be like, dude, you've so got to simplify that down.

Scott Right. No, but I think what he's saying is, like, dude, if you see a person that's a complete dick or that just can't fall in love or can't really be in a vulnerable relationship or can't think about consequences of business action, maybe like a real estate developer in New York that lies and becomes president. But, I mean, you see somebody that is so narcissistic, right, that they can't function in human society in any decent way, regardless of their politics or what they say their commitments are. Thanks for watching.

Chris So here's something interesting. And this is more in the speculative part of what I talk about in my TED talk and what I think about. But it's informed by my experience having spent a decade in China and kind of studying how does the biggest society on the planet manage to generate and maintain the simplest truths? So there is a kind of almost like a personal psychology to the crisis of truth, right? Do we have the humility or do we have the arrogance to search for truth or to believe that we possess it? But I think that there is also something broader and something structural in society, which is kind of, are there enough real and distinctive I don't know if I have a great example to articulate it.

Scott How many Twitter threads that are burning up are burning up because people are like, that's a great question. Can anybody give us more data on this? There's a big gap in this discussion of gun control, and neither of us seem to have the whole picture. Does anybody else have some more studies? No, it's just flame, flamethrower, Mokhtov cocktail. The ones that get a lot of energy are not people asking each other questions. But I think that what the medium does is it makes it a lot easier, right? There's fewer checks, right? So I think there's an invitation in it to like actually become more reflective. But then there's a danger to it because it also could just send us down the Molotov cocktail route.

Chris Right, right, right. But I guess what I want to add to that is I think that there's something deeper than the medium. There's something about almost – how can I articulate it? Like what – What are almost like valid things to bring onto the table and say, hey, we need to complicate this picture?

Scott Let me quote you to you. Separation of proof.

Chris Let me quote you to you, Chris. Intellectually, I think that this is interesting. It makes sense to me that everybody gets the idea of separation of powers. Free society, you need to separate executive, legislature, judiciary, and the idea is that you don't want any one authority to be able to say what is right. It's that we can only say what is right when different authorities work together. And I suspect it's the same with truth, right? We need to separate the proofs so that no one perspective gets to say what's true. And, you know, and what do I mean by proofs? It's, you know, there are scientific proofs and economic and cultural, historical, philosophical, spiritual, right? Some of these are like organized searches with their own rules for what counts as proof to them, like journalism, right? Or academic research or, you know, or maybe you'd say religion or even political parties. And again, where I'm coming from with this is living in China, where in order to maintain simple truths, it's not – like censorship is kind of like the – is the very end of the process. It begins with –

There is a whole – at the kind of the basic origin of where ideas come from, there is a simplification so that if I am living in that society and I want to be a critical thinker – I just – it's like I can't get outside of the suit that I'm in.

Scott Brexit is a great example, right? The first guy who – or first prime minister who was a male guy who lost – I don't know how many prime ministers this thing is going to kill. It may be number three. But David Cameron, its first child sacrificed on the altar here. So it's amazing to the watching world, well, how could all these people vote against what all the people that are dressed up in the robes of intellectual respectability and power? They all said it's true.

Chris Yeah, that's right. So there is something. So I guess I think, you know, we talk about this narcissism and how certain we've all become of the truths that we each possess. I think there's a deep relationship between that certainty that we all feel in our truths and how same, how incestuous our proofs have become. I think that when money is given the same protections as speech, Michael Garfield, Jordan Peterson. But deeper things, like epistemically, when anything that we can't quantify and measure is kind of ignored from the decision-making because it's not real enough. Each of these things, I think, sort of reduces the space between our projects of finding truth in society. And so I think, therefore, as a result, it's just like whatever the medium, the truths that are being generated are going to be simpler, are going to lack the richness and the complexity that they could possess. Thank you very much.

You know, yeah, on the margins, there were people asking those questions, but they were on the margins, right? There is this very unequal search for truth underway that I think means that, you know, some viewpoints are dominant and therefore sort of, you know, the social conversation is oversimplified.

Scott Yeah, there's a 19th century Dutch thinker, Abraham Kuyper, who was, I think he was prime minister in the Netherlands, but he was a Christian theologian. And he started this Christian Democratic Party in the Netherlands, but his big, one of his big ideas was sphere sovereignty. And he thought that, well, God has created all these Spheres for education, for family and procreation, for agriculture, art, economics, worship, labor, all these things. And he thought that these spheres shouldn't be dominant over the other. It's like the church shouldn't tell the business sphere how to do things and business shouldn't try to instrumentalize religion or art or the family. And he thought what the state should do is sort of arbitrate, make sure that no sphere is dominated. I think like, well, who are all these people to tell me that's exactly what to do with my kids? And, you know, what if, you know, I mean, it's just, I get it. I mean, I can get how you can feel incredibly vulnerable when a person with a white coat says you have to do this, this, and this, right?

And so you, I think, so I think you're onto something in that when people feel like that, they feel like objects and not subjects, right? Then they treat the truth like an object, right? Like it's just something to be used because they feel like they're being used.

Chris And I think, I mean, this then becomes slippery territory, right? Because then one wants to question, well, isn't there a kind of hierarchy to the different ways that we access the real? Well, let me ask the preacher a question. Isn't scientific proof somehow more real than spiritual proof? And I think that we're struggling with that question right now, right?

Scott I think it's like Columbus sailed across the ocean blue in 1492. So what? Like, I think that that's – I mean, I'm being crass, but I think people oftentimes – like, we know a lot more than Aristotle knew about his world, right? But we feel much more alienated in it than he did because I think that – No, I think scientific truth is amazing, and it's amazing for what it can do. The problem is it often can't tell us, it can tell us the how questions, but not the why questions. And then what we do is say the why questions are then inferior to the how questions. And then, so I mean, I think part of it is learning a careful, I don't even want to say balance, a careful dance, you know, between all these windows on truth and reality.

Chris And a collaboration. And I think that that's also, again, I feel like this is I guess the thesis that I'm testing is that a lot of our bad relationship with truth is actually more something from the mass media age. And I think it was in the mass media age that we really got good at selling people truth. And kind of eroding a culture of collaboration around it, which is to say, yeah, so scientifically we understand this, but that's not everything. So here is some science. And so you're coming at it from a perspective of you feel that it's important in your family to have some agency about these things. You're right. Let's explore that. I just feel like we're so practiced at using the truth as a weapon against each other, and we're just very unpracticed at figuring out, well, how could you possibly explore with more nuance?

I don't have a good example on the anti-vac movement, but another health-related example that comes to mind is big healthcare debates now about exploding costs of healthcare. It becomes a scientific and a technological problem right away. We need some new technologies to basically make hospitals cheaper, more efficient. You know, help more people with less resources and stuff like that. So, you know, so much in our society, every problem, we think of it as a technological problem. We have this material mindset that science and technology is going to solve it. But actually, you know, you really explore with some of the far-sighted thinkers in healthcare about, well, how do we deal with that problem? And they'll say, well, you know, it's probably actually a cultural problem. In the sense that we've completely alienated ourselves from death. That as a culture, we just have no capacity anymore to accept death, to dignify death, to have a good death. And we are spending billions upon billions of dollars in aggregate, helping us live three months longer with no regard to quality of life.

And so, yeah, there are scientific truths at play there and biological truths and what we can do with the body, but there are also personal truths around, you know, what is your own assessment of your well-being? What matters to you and what kind of choices would you like to make with your life that have just have no reality in our conversations? And in our decision-making, because the science and the optimization objective of live as long as we can is just so much more real.

Scott Bill Maher, in his last monologue, the sort of op-ed piece of his last show at HBO last week, he's like, my hero in the next Democratic debate will be the person that comes up and says, the real crisis in American healthcare is Americans eat shit. And he had this picture of a guy who, in the early 1900s, was the fat guy in the circus. And it's like, now he's just... This is the guy that people would wait in line to see at the circus. Now he's just some guy you see in line at Burger King. And he was like, you just can't say that, right? And of course, that's not the only problem. But that's something no one will talk about. It's so interesting how it used to be that the... And that's just like excised from the discussion.

Chris Well, and so to your point, I mean, we've built such a power around the doctor in the white coat to say that you, doctor, you hold the power to judge whether I am healthy or sick, not me, right? I need to go to you for that determination. If I feel great, but you tell me I'm not fine, your version of reality wins. In some ways, that makes sense. In other ways, that is just totally bonkers. Why shouldn't it be possible for me to feel well, to have a high level of well-being, and suffer from a chronic disease at the same time? And so that kind of choice-making is just completely absent. And so I'm not surprised, then, that we find ways to rebel. And so I think that what is valid is... And anti-vax is a really hard example because there are all of these terrible population consequences of using this as the point of rebellion. But I think what is the truth that's kind of being exposed about that is the doctor-patient relationship that we've built is not a healthy one, is not an open one.

The doctor runs a number of tests and tells us. But, you know, it probably should be that we go to the doctor. The doctor asks us, you know, so, you know, how are you doing? And I say, well, you know, today I'm doing pretty well. Like, okay, so what would we have to do to get you from feeling pretty well to feeling great?

Scott My wife is a nurse practitioner, which, you know, in this country is... It's one of the advanced nursing degrees. I mean, she wears a white coat like a doctor would. She writes prescriptions. She does a lot of the same stuff doctors do. Well, it's interesting. She said what's different is, being a nurse practitioner, the nursing model is a little different than the MD, the physician model, in that the MD model is more pathology-centered, and the nursing model, even in the advanced level, is more person-centered. So you're treating a person, not a pathology. Thanks for watching! You know, so it's interesting. She spent some time in Thailand when she was doing her master's at Penn, her nurse practitioner degree, and she was blown away by the sort of holistic integration there, where you had advanced Western medicine and sort of acupuncture and stuff all in the same hospital. And her nursing eyes were like lighting up, like, this is amazing. But we just don't do stuff like that here.

Chris Yeah, well, that distinction between pathology and person is really interesting because, I mean, you look at... In, you know, say, American society, Canadian society, British society, what are the big causes of disease and death? A lot of it is, you know, personal, I don't know what the right term is, like personal disease, like loneliness, like depression, right? So we need to be treating the person clearly. And somehow we're missing that in our medicine. Yeah, this idea that we've become a know-it-all society, I think that, to some extent, social media has kind of been the catalyst for that. In the mass media age, we simplified truths. In the social media age, we made it so that everybody could have simple truths. And now we see very clearly how toxic to our society simple truths really are. And so there is this kind of You know, irony, I guess, about the time we live in,

which is that, so now, finally, we live in a medium that actually supports, you know, a mass collaborative search for truths that are bigger than any one of us, and no one needs it, because we've already found the truths that we're looking for.

Scott Yeah, when you watch Star Trek, the old Star Trek of the 60s, and Kirk or Spock could just go, computer, tell me about the atmosphere of Mars, and you're like, oh my God, what if we could do that? We now have that, and no one really cares. Like, you could just go, hey, Siri, tell me everything about the atmosphere of Saturn. We can do what they could do on Star Trek. And you're right. We don't find that utterly wonderful, literally. Like, it does not make us full of wonder that we have so much access. So much that could give us a fuller, bigger picture of what's outside ourselves. Because we're more interested in what we can make work for ourselves than something that would strike us with awe and wonder.

Chris I'm writing that down.

Scott Nice. I like that. I feel profound when you write something. It boosts my ego. It boosts my ego and makes me want to go instrumentalize the truth. Yeah. Look how I did that.

Chris So I think, you know, we talked, you know, I guess a month or two ago, you know, like the strong, so the strong version of the contrarian view is that we should just let social media run amok because, you know, the truth that is throwing into crisis is a truth that we needed to kind of rid ourselves of and break away from. And I think that's right. Yeah, no, I'm still with you on that. That there is this, basically, and sort of this distinction between instrumental or not. I mean, we can either search for the truth or we can sell it. And we got so good at selling the truth in the mass media age. And then that was the truth that we dragged into the social media age with us. And social media, I think, made plain how toxic the truth that you can sell, the simplified truth, is to a society. Because it's totally divisive. We don't need to search with one another anymore. And so how do we respond? So part of it, I think there is something structural about really recognizing the big picture that when we do all these things to crowd the projects of finding proof closer and closer together, when journalistic autonomy and academic autonomy and bureaucratic autonomy and all these sources of autonomy Thank you very much.

So there may be something structural, even constitutional, that we can do, just in the way that we separate the powers to help separate the proofs. And that's kind of big picture structural stuff for how we renew society. But I think that there is still this irreducible personal responsibility. That, you know, we're going to have to kind of see what social media is trying to tell us. That these simple truths are kind of worthless now because, you know, the formula for manufacturing them has been given to everyone. And so everybody uses it. You know, everybody wraps up what they want to be true in experts and statistics and pumps out their own truths to the point where now we've just broken public trust in experts and statistics. So the formula is kind of a contradiction in the sense that now the more you use it, the less anybody, the less it works.

But also that the simple truth is self-defeating because you're committing all these lies of omission and all these omissions are the chances for everybody who doesn't like your truth to point at it and say, aha, but you didn't miss...

Scott When you see some, like, you know, these old Gap ads where everybody would be ice skating and they're having, they're all like these great, you know, like good-looking people, you know, near Christmas time. And it's like, wow, if I had that clothing, I would be with those good-looking people and I would feel as good as they look. Or Carr with Matthew McConaughey. I'd have that Matthew McConaughey mystique. I wish we had sound effects. There was this Hot 97, this old rap station in New York. They used to get these feuds. I love these DJ feuds. They'd be like, drop that bomb! And in the background, the guy would go... It was so awesome, like, drop the bomb! We should have that sound effect.

Chris Yeah, so I think that's right. And this is, again, my China hat on, looking at how that society structures the truth engines of society to produce simple truth. And we don't think of it, but we're doing it. In a less coordinated fashion, you know, money has become a kind of dominant logic in many different projects of searching for truth. And yeah, the kind of, you know, powers are kind of, there's a whole sort of political economy of truth, right? So there's something structural to be done there. But I think also there's something personal about recognizing that, yeah, we are holding on to truths like consumer goods and we're fulfilling certain needs, certain narcissistic needs to have and hold on to a sense of what is true, to have that validity.

Scott Yeah, everybody wants to become a social media influencer. It's not like I have this passion for the truth. I don't want to share that because it's more like I want to be an influencer. So what's a truth or factoid or something that can make me an influencer? Because then I could get 200,000 followers and then I'd be somebody. Like, I would feel better about myself, right? But then you won't, because then it's like $300,000, right? It's sort of like this guy I know, Rob Bell, he's a religious guy, he got a cover of Time magazine, he's like, that was iconic for me. But then you know what I figured out? They put someone else on the cover next week. That's how capitalism works. You always have to have this goalpost that moves.

Chris So you have to kind of... So I think that's the personal project. If the thinking is that somehow we basically got two choices now in a social media age. So either truth is dead in the sense that we just give up the idea of...

Scott Yeah, I mean, the most positive outcome there would be, like, we'd become peaceful, disaffected, alienated narcissists. Like, we'd all just, we'd let and let and let and let and let live. That's the best possible outcome, right? I mean, the worst is that, you know, we'd go back to bloody continents.

Chris Yeah, right. So that's option one, right? We just kill off the truth entirely and play the cynical game. And option two, then, is that somehow we resurrect truth. Resurrect a truth that is larger than ourselves. Give that ideal real meaning so that we feel once again sort of compelled to search together, to have a humility about the truth that I can possess and to recognize that I need you to get out of my own prison of my own ways of seeing the world and glimpse something And what is interesting about that is that in order to do that, it seems that we all have to, at a kind of personal level, make a decision to renounce the truths that we already own.

Scott Yep. Which is hard. This is Indigo Girls, right? The hardest to learn is the least complicated. It's not complicated. It's just hard. Yeah. Because all the energy, right, is behind the consumer kind of view of the small truth.

Chris Yeah, I think we just don't know how to function if we don't have it.

Scott This is a quote from, ever since I've read it, I think about it, not every day, but every week, from a guy named Tomas Halik. He's a Czech Catholic priest who became a priest when Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. He had to do it in secret. And he was also a psychotherapist. And he's talking about Nietzsche's statement, God is dead, which is kind of a statement that truth is dead, right, in the gay science. And he says, God is dead. That sentence uttered at the end of the 19th century continued to fascinate for the next hundred years. Maybe it was not only a sentence about God and against God, but also one containing something of God's message to us. A God who has not endured death is not truly living. I feel like you could just substitute truth for God in that conversation,

in that paragraph, and so much of what we're talking about, right? This, like, the part of the quest for truth is these personal and societal crises of the truth, right? Like, you know, that's not opposed to the search for the truth, but it's a part and parcel of it.

Chris And truth is dead. And that these are similar, similar, what's the word I'm looking for? But like moments in human cultural evolution is coming to terms with that. And I do feel, I really do feel that so much of the... The sense of helplessness and powerlessness that a lot of us feel is because we're clinging to the old paradigm. We're clinging to the kind of mass media truth where the truth was that thing that was curated for us and given to us and the lies of omission were not broadcast and so there was a clarity. Thank you. was a consequence of there only being a couple people who could curate what got broadcast. There was a consistency to the messages because there was a concentration of the broadcast. And so, yeah, I think that we do need to kind of recognize or if we could recognize that this kind of helplessness and powerlessness is because we're trying to cling to an old paradigm of truth that frankly was unworthy of us, that was a paradigm of truth for sheep.

And really kind of recognized it like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not try to stitch that paradigm off by regulating social media companies and telling them, we've got to take better care of the formula. Let's let it go. And let's take this rare moment to do what Nietzsche did and say, God is fucking dead. Yeah, yeah. And it's not to say that there is no room for spirituality, but it's to say we have to begin, we have to resurrect the whole search and the whole relationship with that ideal. Because the ideal that we had so carefully preserved, actually it was unworthy of us.

Scott Well, or at least it doesn't help us in it. This is like what I like about your book, The Age of Discovery. Like the Renaissance periods are, we sort of, we look at a period like the Renaissance and we romanticize it, but it was as chaotic and disruptive and scary as it was fruitful, right? And there's always a temptation in these disorienting and yet bountiful periods to say, look, you know... This is the book of Exodus, right? When things look tough in the wilderness, let's go back to Egypt. It wasn't so bad in Egypt. You know, we got three squares a day. There's always the temptation to go back to Egypt, right? There's always the temptation, which we can't do. I mean, you know, the only... You know, now it's just not fitting anymore. It's like, you know, it'd be strange, you know, remember when the space shuttles would launch and the booster rockets, like once it would get out of the atmosphere, the booster rockets would be cast off, right?

And was that because they were worthless? No, but it'd be strange after they were cast off if we saw the astronauts in there. Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching! That was a big deal, the shuttle. When it was. When it was a deal. Yeah.

Chris Interesting. You know, so I remember visiting, I guess it was last year, I was in Houston. Went to the, I guess the Johnson Space Center? Yeah, yeah. In Houston. And they've got like a full scale, I guess it was like a training model. Thank you for having me.

Scott That's like the Star Trek. As the Star Trek evolves, they're like the old Star Trek looked with switches. Now everything's like in the new Star Trek show is like touchscreens.

Chris Yeah, that's right. Or even it's not even a screen. It's just like a holographic. Yeah, it's a holographic display in the air.

Scott God, I can't wait till we get those.

Chris Well, I guess we're not that far because there's already like the HoloLens that you can wear.

Scott Yeah, man.

Chris Yeah, that's pretty interesting stuff. So yeah, I think that that is part, like fundamentally there is this kind of courage that's required to be willing to assert that God is dead and to trust that, you know, as much as that assertion is inviting a project to create something new, it is also a project to hold on to what is worth preserving. Yeah. Because it is, you know, fundamentally, to say God is dead, it is a spiritual project.

Scott I mean, I love that phrase. If God, who he says is a God, incapable of death, is not fully alive. Like, if the truth can't die, is it really fully alive in a world that's finite and fragile? And there's no resurrection without death.

Chris Yeah. So I think that that's where we should leave it. You know, I... Somehow we've got to grapple with that this is the choice we face. Yeah. We kill off the truth entirely or we resurrect it. And either way, I mean, I think that, you know, if we kill off the truth entirely, I guess, you know, as you say, like the worst case scenario, well, best case scenario is we all become narcissists. I think worst case scenario is we kill off democracy.

Scott Yeah. It could be worse than that. It could be worse than that.

Chris Well, yeah, it could be worse than that too.

Scott That would be a middle range of options.

Chris But imagine if we could, I would love to live in a world where the most popular conversations on Twitter are the ones asking questions.

Scott Yeah, I'm going to do that when we stop. When we finish this recording, I'm going to tweet this out. What was the last big Twitter thread you got involved in that began with a really good, honest question? I'm going to ask and see how anybody replies. Well, thank you, my friend. No, thank you. When is your TED Talk?

Chris What day? It's the 24th of September.

Scott Twelve days. Is it live-streamed?

Chris I don't think it's live-streamed. I think it actually gets taped. Thank you for your help developing the ideas.