 So, did social media help fragment America suddenly? I mean, if you go on social media, you can see it. You don't learn on social media. Social media is a form for abuse. Form for abuse on the right, a form for abuse on the left, a form for abuse for anybody. Even with an objectivism, a form for abuse, and disagreement, and fighting, and arguing, often over things that are pfft. So, yeah, but I think that the solution to this, of course, Jonathan Haidt wants to regulate, wants to control, he wants government to convene, he wants minimum age requirements, he wants to control the like button control, maybe influence the algorithm. You know, he wants the philosopher kings to go in there and calm everybody down, and calm things down, and bring, and that's not the solution. Even in the world in which we live today, the solution is to let it rip. Because this will come to a head, and to the extent that there are still rational people out there. What we're going to find is that what we need in the 21st century is new institutions. The existing institutions are not built to deal with a quantity of information. They're not built to deal with the ability of people, and the time that people have, and the willingness of people to engage with this information, and to engage in discussions. What we really need are new institutions. New institutions that help us filter out, that help us calm the voices, that help us be more objective, that help us deal with this massive information that none of us have been trained to deal with. What we need is to develop backbones, to deal with more insult and conflict. People want to cancel you, the question is, what do you do about it? Well, one thing you can do about it is fight back, refuse to be canceled. But those institutions are going to have to arise, because the current state of affairs, well, we don't trust anybody. We don't trust anything. And I'm not saying unjustifiably, justifiably we don't trust the government. Justifiably, we don't trust many of the authorities. Justifiably, we don't completely just trust the media. Justifiably, we don't trust the universities. Or at least big chunks of the universities. We're gonna have to find, if we're gonna survive, we're gonna have to find new institutions. And how does that happen? It's not gonna happen through central planning. It's not gonna happen by somebody, by me telling you, okay, here are the three things that we need to do. It's gonna happen through the marketplace. How did newspapers come about? How did newspapers become the objective deliverers of news which was their intent? That wasn't originally what they were. How did journals, academic journals develop? How did universities coming to be? None of these institutions existed a few hundred years ago. None of them existed in the current form, or the form they developed into in the 20th century. And none of them was centrally planned. All of them evolved in a marketplace. Through trial and error, through brilliant people taking risks, trying new things, figuring out what worked, figuring out what didn't. They didn't happen because intellectuals sat around and said, okay, these are the institutions we need to build. No, intellectuals went out, they built institutions, some of them succeeded, some of them failed. And that's the beauty of a market. That's the beauty of freedom. What we need today is the freedom to build new institutions. I think the web is going to do that. I think we're going to do that online. I think social media is a crude attempt at a first step in the direction of building those institutions, but it's not a very good one. So it will ultimately fail and ultimately institutions, social media is an institution, will be built to replace it. Places where one can have real debates, places where one can really focus on discovering truth rather than knocking the other side down. But this is not something you map out. This is something that entrepreneurs need to go out there and create and build and make and do. If some of those entrepreneurs are inspired by objectivism, all of the power to them. But it's not an objectivist project, it's a project, it's a market project. And indeed the audience is not objectivist, the audience is the audience, the people out there. So what we need is more freedom, more space, more thought, more risk taking in the field of building these kind of institutions. Is the university going to survive? You know, University of Austin is an attempt to build a slightly different institution. But the problem is they're building the same institution just with different professors, but it's still the same old university. Maybe there are other experiments out there that are breaking up the university, they're changing the university, they're challenging the university, they're going to challenge that institution and disrupt it. The media is being disrupted by some stack and by independent journalists. And social media will develop as a means of communicating some of those. So who knows in what way all this will be disrupted. But the key is that we have the freedom to disrupt and the more government regulates and controls and we don't like shape buttons, but we like this button, we don't like that button. Let the button flourish, let people experiment with buttons. And ultimately, ultimately I do believe that the market will provide us with the right kind of balance, the right kind of products. And this is the difference that the left doesn't trust the market, although they claim to be Democrats, they claim to be believing the people, yet they don't trust the people. What they trust are the elites, the philosopher kings to dictate all that. If there's one reason, I mean, I think, let me just say, I think Jonathan Heights article is definitely worth reading. It's really well written. It's full of interesting stuff. It'll get you thinking. You won't agree with it. But if you only read stuff that you agree with, that's boring and silly. So I definitely think Jonathan Heights article is worth reading. It's interesting. It's stimulating. It's challenging. But there is a section here that I think is particularly terrific. And Jonathan Heights actually is written about this one. And that is on childhood, on the fact that what happens and what's happened with, I guess, Generation Z or whatever this latest generation is, which is that he's done a lot of research on this latest generation, on Gen Z, those born after 1997. He puts a lot of the blame for the state of the world we have today on them, poor kids. It's not really their fault, but they're manifesting it because they grew up protected, shielded. They grew up spoiled with helicopter parents, with supervised everything. And as a consequence, and as a consequence, they can't think for themselves. They're offended by anything they disagree with. They don't know how to absorb new information. Jonathan Haid has called this safetyism. They're concerned with safety, but it's not just safety from falls, cuts, bruises. It's safety from a fence. Yeah, Richard says, Jonathan Haid co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind. That's the book I mentioned earlier that's excellent on free speech and on this generation's inability to think because their world is so narrow and anything outside of this world is a threat. It scares them. And of course, they grew up with the internet. And because they grew up with the internet, they're bombarded with stuff. And in order to organize the stuff that they're bombarded with, they form little cliques, little clubs, little tribes, and they lash out, they form little gangs on Twitter and they try to cancel people and they get offended and they get upset. They're the real snowflakes. And I like the part where he talks about free play. Here's a sentence. Unsupervised free play is nature's way of teaching young mammals the skills they'll need as adults which for humans include the ability to cooperate, making enforced rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts and accept defeat. Also how to think, solve problems. I mean, it's amazing to me how so many intellectuals just ignore reason, ignore thinking. Everything's social, everything's social for them. But anyway, I've not met this to be. So kids don't get an opportunity to learn this. They don't get an opportunity to cooperate with others to build a tower babble. They don't get an opportunity, just play and do damage. God, did I do damage as a kid. I mean, the thing I think that really in that sense made me who I was is that I was an incredibly independent kid and just went out and did my thing. Nobody supervised me. Nobody supervised us, none of the kids in my neighborhood were supervised kids. We came home from school, dropped our bag, buy mom, see you for dinner or maybe stayed for a little while, did our homework and then went out, played soccer in the street with driving cars, formed little gangs that fought one another, played hide and seek in the woods. I mean, we were just out there, completely independent. Took a bus to where we needed to go, walked everywhere. Nobody drove us. And I think that has been so crucial to my development that the idea of play, that is interaction, but the idea of independence more than anything. The idea that you don't have to rely on your parents and everybody else. Did both fight, I mean, I used to fight, we used to throw rocks at one, I mean, we used to literally hurt each other in damaging ways, not a particularly good way. But yeah, it was wild. And this was every day. I mean, there were periods in my life where I used to read a lot, spent a lot of time at home reading and then my mom would get angry and she'd like, you're reading too much. Go play, you're reading too much. That was the way I was brought up. Don't read so much. But I went through this period of being out there all the time to reading all the time, but I did my own thing. All right, so I think this whole issue of analyzing the history of the last few decades is truly fascinating. I think social media plays a huge role in all of this. And it's played a mostly, you know, a negative role. If you look at how people have developed, it doesn't have to be, but it has developed a negative role, a negative place in exacerbating the disintegration, the fragmentation of American society. And the lack of unity, the lack of shared values, they all know shared values anymore. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.