 So, Jonathan H. H. starts with a metaphor which I like, it's a metaphor that's going to get me off on a tangent, but it's probably a metaphor that is worth talking about because it both shows you the quality of the Jewish Christian God and also serves as a metaphor for life today. So, the metaphor Jonathan H. uses is that of the Tower of Babel, and I don't know how many of you remember the story of the Tower of Babel, how many of you remember it from when you read the book of Genesis? I'm curious, how many of you have read the book of Genesis? How many of you have read the Old Testament? I'd be curious to know. Anyway, in the book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah, the descendants of Noah actually achieve great things, and they are successful, and they are confident, and they are excited, and what they do is they go out there and they actually build a skyscraper. They build a tower that is reaching the heavens, and wow, I mean, this is like, I don't know, 5,000 years ago, and they're building this amazing, really, really, really high tower feet of human engineering and coordination and work together, and it's quite spectacular, and God looks at this, God looks at this, and he's offended, he's offended. And I'm quoting here, this is Jonathan Haid quoting the Bible as humans. This is a good translation, I don't know. He says, look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. This species, these human beings, this is me now, they have one language, they're one people, they're united, they can communicate, they can trade, they can build stuff, they're making stuff, they're achieving things. And this is only the beginning of what they will do, God says to himself, I guess he's talking to himself. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them, wow, what a great statement about human beings, isn't that terrific? God should be super happy, this creature he's created, nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them, no, but you see, God is a bit of an idolist, God is a little envious. He doesn't like the hubris of these human beings who think they can do anything they want, who think they can build skyscrapers into the heavens, who think they can achieve all the things and do the impossible on earth. So he says, I guess to himself, come, let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech. She goes down and he basically gives them, it makes it impossible for them to understand each other. They all have their own language now. You know, this is anti-globalization, right? This is, you can't trade, you can't communicate, you can't build anything together, and as a consequence of the inability to communicate, inability to work together, inability now to cooperate because they're all talking different languages, they can't understand anything. They falter in the building of the tower, the tower collapses, it goes into decay, it's not clear from the book, but that you get this complete another fragmentation of society, complete fragmentation at the individual level. So Jonathan Haid is drawing the comparison to the world in which we live today. What we've got is more than tribalism, he tells us. It is complete fragmentation, it's person against person. It's we live in a society that is hateful and there's a society where people are going after each other and a society where there is very little unity, coordination, trust, common language, the things that are necessary to build, create, make. Now I think this analogy of a Tau Babel is a really powerful one. It goes to the idea of disintegration and it goes to the idea of the importance of concept and language and the ability to communicate and the ability to trade and the ability to cooperate. It goes to the importance of all of that and one of the, I'd say one of the great beauties of the modern world has been our ability to, in spite of the fact that we speak different languages, in spite of the fact that we come from different cultures, in spite of all that, the amount of cooperation, the amount of communication, the amount of wealth creation that has resulted from the cooperation and communication is astounding and a lot of that is due to what somebody called in the chat, the universal translator. But yeah, in a sense, a kind of ability to translate quickly, an ability to maybe have a uniform language, which is English, which is a globalized language, a global language. But more importantly, the ability to translate quickly and the ability therefore for us to travel all over the world and communicate with people that not that long ago we would have had a really, really hard time communicating. Now, you know, when I can't communicate with somebody here because I don't speak Spanish and they don't speak English, they pull up an app. They speak English, they speak Spanish into the app and the app translated and the app speaks English to me and then I speak English into the app and translate it in Spanish and it's pretty amazing, you can do that in pretty much every language on the planet, pretty cool. So it's interesting that on one hand, we today have the technology to solve the problem created by the envious God who wanted to put human beings down and created a fragmentation of languages. By the way, that is I think the origin of different nations and different, the origin of different languages. It's kind of a weird, weird story to explain all that and presents God in a pretty awful, pretty, pretty awful perspective. But we have today the technology to unify us, to allow us to understand each other, to allow us to cooperate with each other, to allow us to benefit from trade across 8 billion people around the globe and to make us all richer as a consequence, to make our lives all better as a consequence, to enhance the lives of almost everybody on the planet through mutual trade and mutual communication and mutual cooperation and by, in a sense, going back, going back to building the Tower of Abel. And I think that's the path humanity has been on. It's been on a path of greater and greater cooperation, integration, cooperation, building wealth creation on this upward path. But Jonathan Haig tells a slightly different story. He says, certainly since the early 2010s, the United States has started completely fragmenting, losing trust in one another. And he blames, for all of this, he blames social media. So I'm going to disagree with him because I don't think, I don't think, oh God, Adam Campbell says, Iran Bible study is the best. I've always wondered why God never told mankind the earth was round. It never occurred to me it was out of jealousy. Most Christians haven't read the Bible, ignorance is bliss. Thanks Adam. And yes, maybe you should do, that's an idea. We should start a Sunday school. And maybe the episode of the Iran book show every Sunday, we should take a passage from the Bible and study it together. I think that would be hilarious. If we could get a good translation, that would be a lot of fun. And I know many of you, I have indeed read almost the entire Old Testament. I think the five books, the five original books, first books of the Bible, I think I've read more than once because, and we studied them at school. So when you read them, we studied them, we studied commentary on them for pretty much every grade in school. In Israel, you study the Bible. There is a Bible class as part of, and you matriculate in your matriculation, you take a matriculation exam in math and in physics and in history and in English and in Bible studies. Everybody does. It's a required course. So Israelis are pretty well versed in the Old Testament. Maybe that's why Israel is a relatively, other than kind of the nutty religious guys, Israel is a pretty secular society because they've actually read the book. They can't take it too seriously once you read it. So Jonathan, he says, you know, we basically are disintegrating and I have a lot of sympathy for this because I think there's a lot of truth in it. We have over the last 10, 15 years, we have as a culture, we have lost trust in all of our institutions. We've lost trust in our government, you know, and both sides. Left hates the government, right hates the government for completely different reasons, but they hate it. We've lost trust in our institutions of our universities, our schools, our teachers and in each other. We don't like each other. We don't trust each other. Indeed, we hate each other. I mean, the vitriol that the left expresses towards the right, I remember this came, this really came, the first time I really realized this was in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don't know if you've seen that show, hysterical show, and you know, really, can be really, really funny and really, really embarrassing sometimes. Anyway, this is a show, this is a show, Larry David, Larry David at the time, I can't remember what season this was, but this is a season where he's still married, he's married to his wife. And I think for their 10th wedding anniversary, his wife says, you can sleep with anybody. You know, once you can go out there, find out what you can sleep with, you can have sex with another woman, I'm fine with it, go do it. So the whole season, he's trying to sleep with somebody, you know, his wife gave permission, you know, this is the kind of the ideal scenario, she's trying to sleep with somebody. Anyway, he finds somebody, right, an actress, I think, and this is in her, in her trailer. And you know, they're making out, they're making out and they're about to have sex. And from the corner of his eye, he sees a picture, I think it's of like George Bush, right? And he stops and he says, you're a Republican. And she says, yeah. And he says, I can't have sex with a Republican. You know, and he goes into this complete, you know, like Larry David does, complete, goes nuts over the fact that this woman's a Republican, actually be a Republican. He can't have a relationship with a Republican woman. And you know, she's like incredibly good looking and everything. And she's just, you know, this is the, this is the thing. This is the one time he's going to have to sleep with another woman with his wife's permission and he can't go through it. Not because of anything, not because of morality, not because of, he doesn't like her, not because he doesn't love her, not because he's not attracted to her, not because of any of those things, but because she's a Republican. And that's when it kind of hit me. Yeah, there are people who are like that. They, it's not just they disagree. It's not just that they think the other party is wrong. It's that they literally despise the other party. They literally hate the other side. I think that's the first time it really hit me in, in, as an expression of the popular culture, a question of the popular culture of that. So, you know, society is broken apart. And of course, there's a sense in which American society has always had this. American society certainly pre-World War II was quite, was it quite contentious, politically, politics was always, you know, going back to slavery. And it was always a kind of a spiteful and angry and there were long debates and arguments and people called each other names going back to the founders. And, and they didn't agree and they, but it seems like it's much worse today. And it seems in a sense that it's infected more than just the intellectuals, more than just the politicians, it's all of us. And again, Jonathan Haidt, as we'll get to blame social media for this. And that it's a distrust of all the institutions that, you know, one of the things he mentions is the news, obviously. Newspapers, TV, TV stations, and so on. But again, universities and government and all these institutions, we now resent, we hate, we don't believe, we don't trust. And of course, he doesn't say this in the article, I will say it. I think what we've grown most distrustful of is, or put it this way, what used to unite us in spite of all the divisions, which used to be common among Americans in spite of all the divisions, was a particular sense of life, was a particular view of the world that don't tread on me, I can achieve anything, leave me alone, let me be free. So a sudden, and this was true, I think, in the past of left, right, you know, maybe not the progressives, but the thrust of the American people had a deep respect and love for the founding fathers, a deep respect of love for America, but a deep respect and love for America not because of the beauty of the countryside, not because of its religiosity, that's Tucker Carlson's view of America. But they had a deep respect and love for America because it was the land of the free, because if there was the land of opportunity, because it was the land of, leave me alone, let me do my thing, let me go and achieve. And maybe I'm giving you my explanation for all this before we even get to Jonathan Hayes, that has gone away, that we no longer trust. We don't no longer believe that this is the land of opportunity. We no longer believe that this is the land of freedom and liberty, and with good reason, right, we don't share that view. We're now divided and entitled into looters, moochers, producers. We divide ourselves and have been divided by the mixed economy into fighting over who, how to divide the so-called pie. Rather than going out there and pursuing our dream and achieving and succeeding, we're now squabbling off of the crumbs that are left to us by the welfare state. So if I had to pinpoint the origin of the division in America, the origin of the fragmentation in America, it is the welfare state. And it is the mixed economy. It is the complete disintegration of any kind of ideology. And the horrific way in which we mean taught history, the founding fathers, and the principles in which this country was created. And this is true, again, left and right. This is not, I blame them all. So yes, on the right, you get love of country, you get patriotism, but you don't get love of America. You get love of country. Fill in the blank. But a love of America requires an understanding of American principles. It requires the understanding of what America stands for. It requires an understanding of what liberty and freedom are. And that's what we don't have, and that's what's causing this fragmentation. But, see, Jonathan Haidt can't see that. And most of the intellectuals today can't see that. Because they occupy the mixed economy. They are the mixed economy. They, you know, these what I consider better intellectuals, certainly better intellectuals of the left, they occupy this mishmash, this convoluted middle, this no principled stand, this, they can't quite articulate what made America great and what changed. Well, what changed was, what changed was less liberty, less freedom, greater dependence on the one institution we should not depend on, which is government, beyond our safety, your government. So you see this from all these intellectuals in the middle. They are intellectually a mixed economy. And that cannot hold. And the culture of a mixed economy cannot hold. A culture that says, we want freedom, but not too much. We want people to be responsible for themselves, but we also want to give them a robust safety net at other people's expense. We want entrepreneurs, but we want to control them. All of that is completely untenable. And then, of course, there is a reason why we came to distrust our institutions. There is a reason why we distrust government. It has failed over and over and over again. It has failed in every promise it has made from suddenly over the last 50 years from the war in Vietnam, massive failure to the war on poverty, massive failure to the war on drugs, massive failure to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, massive failures to the promise of economic growth, unstoppable economic growth and prosperity, massive failure. Our government has failed over and over and over again. The promise of an uncorrupt government. Well, we saw Watergate. And of course, we saw the way politicians have behaved and the way they've gotten rich since then, massive failure. So there's a reason why we lose trust in an institution which has nothing to do with social media. It has everything to do with those institutions deserving, deserving that we stop trusting them. There's a reason we've lost trust in the universities. Universities have become and not just over the last 10 years as Jonathan Haid would argue. No, systematically over the last 100 years they become more and more and more captured by one philosophical attitude, view, political attitude, view has become less and less open debate, new ideas, less and less respected, less and less treated well. I mean, just as an objectivist, how many times do I hear the story of students telling me that they're afraid, afraid to bring up Inran's name in class? Not afraid because the professor would challenge them, ask them difficult questions. Afraid because the professor would dismiss it out of hand and not even wanna relate to it, not even wanna comment on it, dismiss them and Inran completely out of, completely dismissing the student themselves. And of course, that has become the scope of what is acceptable in universities has shrunk and got narrower and narrower over time. There's a reason we stop trusting the universities. And what they do teach is often so ridiculous and silly and unintelligible and ludicrous and impractical that yeah, we've lost trust. And then of course, there's the media, which is another major source of lack of trust. It used to be that people trusted the media. There was their local newspaper, there was some national newspapers, there were three networks and that was it. And even back then, I questioned how much people should have trusted the media. Even back then, you could get out and out communists, what was the guy's name who in the 1930s wrote for the Washington, for the New York Times, I forget. But even the media has become more and more and more biased, more and more and more, even before social media, more and more and more partisan. Social media has made that much worse but I doubt that started with social media seems to be started with cable news but of course cable news, one of the reasons cable news was successful was because it started before that. It just that the only thing that you had was left-leaning media, that's all there was. There was very little anything else. Then you had talk radio, which provided some right-leaning, and then only you got Fox and everything kind of splendid from there. So our institutions in a sense deserved the lack of trust. Deserve, yeah, Walter Durante, thank you. Thank you, Alex, Walter Durante. Our institutions deserve, you can look him up, he's interesting, interesting how much influence he had on FDR, on I think many American intellectuals, his portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union, or Russia, communist Russia at the time, was super influential, you should read about him. Yes, so all these institutions justifiably, I think, started losing our trust slowly a long time ago, but you see, some of us knew this all the time. Yeah, I can't really, you have to be careful when you read the New York Times, you have to adjust, I in fact, of course would read the New York Times and comment on it and comment on the biases and comment on the way they spun stories. And we all knew this, but it didn't become popular, it didn't become something everybody knew until more recently. So the lack of trust was something that evolved, it's something that has grown and that social media has allowed to explode, allowed to come out and dominate the scene, because what in these does social media do? And it's interesting that I hate, and I've seen others do this, they point to a particular moment in time as the beginning of the deterioration of social media, because if you think about early social media, if you think about Facebook and Twitter, particularly Facebook in the early days, or as though in some other social media platforms before Facebook, the primary thing that they were good for, it was you put up pictures, you chat with friends, you discuss common interest, it was all free, you connected with people you hadn't connected with in a long time, this is my space, right? My space, this is a wonderful thing, this is just communication, creating new spaces, new groups of people who share particular values. But what happened is, I think, you know, people would share information about themselves, but it was limited to the people in your group and your universe, right? And that in a sense changed. And it's changed, I think in 2011, right, is the year where everything in social media changed, because it changed when social media introduced first the like button, so people could come and like your stuff, then Twitter introduced the retreat button, which basically not only expressed liking the stuff, but now sent whatever it is that you tweeted to everybody that I know and affirmed my support of what you were tweeting, so now I'm voting in support of you. Facebook immediately followed with the share button. And as soon as you got the retreat and the share, things just exploded. Now again, these things exploded into a world where we're already losing trust in institutions. But suddenly you had millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people suddenly participated in what they thought was good, what they thought was bad, what they think was okay, what they think should grow, what they think should shrink, suddenly everybody got a vote. And suddenly it became a game. Who could get more likes? Who could get more retweets? Who could build the biggest audience? Who could get the most subscribers? And how do you do that? We do that through outrage, offense. It turned out that the things that got the most positive response on Facebook and Twitter were the things that were angriest, the things that were most offensive, the things that took the most craziest stands possible. And suddenly the world started fragmenting into little groups of people angry at other groups and achieving fame, success and fame on the particular social media through attacking other groups. And this of course brought out the worst in people. And again, people didn't know what to trust. They didn't know who to trust. They didn't trust anybody maybe. Which left them open to conspiracy theories. It left them open to wacky, crazy, silly ideologies. It made them open to anger and hatred. So what dominated, both on the left and on the right were a few small groups who took their ideology super seriously, whose ideology became more and more and more detached from actual reality. But who agitated and who dominated started to dominate this public sphere. And that made people who already distrustful, disagreeable, it made them even more so. It made them more suspicious. Now this whole phenomenon of social media and people using social media to get the news and people using social media to discover the truth and people using social media, in a sense as a forum that replaces all those institutions they used to trust. So social media became the place where you went to find out about stuff instead of going to the newspaper, instead of going to TV or instead of going to a book or instead of going to anything else. You went on Twitter and asked a question or you went on Twitter and made a comment. Now there's something here that's interesting and I'm gonna just talk about this for a second. This is me thinking aloud if you will because I find this interesting. There's a sense in which, particularly when it comes to media, maybe even when it comes to universities, the 20th century, 19th century and the 20th century build institutions that were focused around expertise. They were focused around the idea of division of labor in this way. Most of us are too busy making a living, getting to work, raising families. I mean, particularly in the 19th century, early 20th century, we spent a lot of time at work, a lot of time scraping by, a lot of time getting by. We didn't have time to investigate, to figure out exactly what's going on, to have vast opinions about lots of different things. Most people, most people accepted a certain division of labor where the media were experts. They did their job, they got the news and we consumed it and we did our thing and who has time to question what they're saying. Who has time to figure out biases or anything like that which is accepting. And there's a sudden sense, the same at universities. People didn't read that much, people didn't know that much, people weren't exposed to that much information. There were experts, those experts told us and I think most people just accepted what the experts had in pretty much every field, from the intellectual fields to the sciences, to medicine, to pretty much everything. But what has happened, what has happened because of a combination of two things. What has happened because the combination of more free time, wealth, more time to read, more time to investigate, more time to think, even for the average person. The work week is for shorter, we have a lot more time on our hands. We have fewer kids, we have a lot more time on our hands. So the combination of having more time on our hands, with the internet, has suddenly brought vast quantities of information, to our fingertips, to our eyeballs, to right there, right in front of us, it's right here. Why do I need the New York Times, when I can, I'm getting the information directly from the sources, supposedly at least. Why can't I come to conclusions, why can't I decide, what do I need, what do I need the experts for? And what we've seen is this idea that, well, I have enough time, I can figure out what's true and what's not, I don't need to listen to experts, everybody can figure this out, we have access to the data, it's right here, it's right in front of us, the internet gives us all this, and it's massive amounts of information. It's unbelievable amounts of information. So information went from being scarce, only the experts could access it, to information being massive. And now institutions fell apart as a consequence, not a consequence primarily of this, consequence of ideas, but also this, suddenly, we were looking at stuff and looking at what they were teaching at university, or looking at stuff and reading what they were saying in the newspaper and saying, this doesn't match. And people were doing this across the political and philosophical spectrum, these things don't match, what's going on here? And suddenly everybody thought they could become an expert. You saw this more than anything, you saw this with COVID. Everybody suddenly became an expert in statistics. Everybody was reading studies, everybody could tell you what a good study was, what a bad study was, everybody could tell you what drugs worked and what drugs didn't work, everybody had an opinion about the vaccines, everybody had an opinion about masks, everybody had an opinion about everything. How many people are actually qualified to have an opinion about any of these things? Very few, very few. But the internet, social media and our time, particularly during COVID, we had lots of time, gave everybody the impression that this isn't hard, of course it is hard, it's super hard. And of course what really happened wasn't that people were looking at studies, people just picked and chose based on who knows what, emotion mostly, which experts they wanted to listen to, but now they had access to a million experts. Yeah, many experts got it wrong and almost all the amateurs got it wrong because epidemiology is a difficult field. It requires years of study. Statistics is a difficult science. It requires real study. And it's statistics in particularly probability theory is super counterintuitive. Your intuition doesn't work when it comes to probability. So everybody becomes an expert suddenly. Everybody has an opinion about everything, foreign policy, I go on Twitter, everybody knows about tanks, everybody knows about military strategy, everybody knows about Ukraine, everybody knows about COVID, about monkey parks, about everything. Because they read it, they saw a video on YouTube. I saw a video on YouTube and it says XYZ and everything's right. So you really get this perfect storm in the 2010s. You get a situation where the institutions are crumbling because of the mixed economy. And again, mixed economy here also, this is around ideas, a lack of any kind of principled ideas and to the extent that there are any ideas, they're kind of wacky left ideas. A mixed economy of the soul and a mixed economy of the economy and a welfare state. So the institutions are crumbling, we're losing trust in them anyway. And then you get the internet in around 2000 really, mid 90s, early 2000s, just flooding us with information. And then on top of that, you get social media that now takes that information and puts it in bite sizes and allows us to consume only the information from people who agree with us already. So it's reinforcing the ideas that we have, reinforcing our supposed expertise. So when we go and look up COVID, we only see the experts that agree with us. We don't see anybody else. And if we see anybody else that presented as, oh, those wackos, those crazies. So we get these echo chambers, these bubbles, however you want to call it. So I think social media has been over the last 10 years super destructive in that sense. But it's only super destructive because it came when it came as all these institutions are crumbling as we were getting flooded with information and as we're wealthy enough to have time, to have time to supposedly analyze all this. 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. 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