Double-Header on Consciousness and Self-Knowledge: #264 & #268

Both episodes, #264 and #268, do cover some interesting ground about our consciousness and our self-knowledge. Neither felt like they unearthed anything particularly new, however. So I'll cover both in this one entry.

Episode #264 Consciousness and Self
Sam had already broadcast with Anil Seth (as episode #113 in January 2018) and he brought it out again because of a book Anil just released. I didn’t really care for that podcast episode the first time around, but here are a few new comments:

1) Even after a 3-hour podcast, we are no closer to answering the question “what is consciousness?”

2) Anil attacks the plausibility of the philosophical zombie based on the notion that if it is complex enough to appear identical to something that it conscious, then it's probably going to be conscious also. I had hopes that his arguments about brain complexity and the entropy of cognitive states was going to give us a toehold into how to build a conscious information processor, but… no.

3) I'm more sympathetic now to the idea of panconsciousness, starting in atoms and growing in flies and bats and so on to humans. Anil's theory is that consciousness evolves; it consists merely of basic motor responses in simpler beings, and develops in richness with increasingly complex brains. It does seem pretty obvious.

Episode #268: The Limits of Self-Knowledge
Here, the questions are how do we know, and how do we know what we know? As Sam's listeners are aware, he's particularly concerned with how many people in America are running around spouting gibberish which they just have to know at some level are simply lies, and yet they cling to them like barnacles to a sunken ship. Disbelief of climate change, Voter Fraud, Systemic Racism everywhere, the 2020 election... our country, it seems, is filled with idiots. How did that happen? Of course they reference Dunning & Kruger, who came up with the famous work on the inverse correlation with competence and confidence.

Unfortunately, neither are able to propose any kind of antidote for this epidemic of willful ignorance. So ultimately, the whole podcast is not really much more than a bemoaning of our limitations as a species.

I did have one thought while listening to the podcast, which was that the Right brain v. Left brain stuff covered in #234 probably plays a role in how we delude ourselves.

Here's a throwaway thought they covered, worthy of Chuck Palahniuk, which is a good place to stop:
The first rule of Alzheimer's is to not recognize that you have Alzheimer's.

#261, Belief and Identity, with Jonas Kaplan

I don't know about you, but I prefer to get my news from reliable news sources such as Le Monde or The Economist, and I generally choose airlines with experienced pilots, such as United or American Airlines, and I also tend to get health care from a licensed and successful medical practice such as a hospital. I do NOT, however, like it when the journalists try to fly the plane. Or the pilot wants to operate on me. Or the doctor tries to investigate government corruption.

That's why I'm happiest when Sam Harris is interviewing someone who works in the field of neurology and neuroscience. Like today's episode on how we form beliefs and a sense of identity. This is his metier! It's what he speaks with the most authority on.

That said, I don't think he needed to spend quite so much time telling us how many references that some article he published with Jonas gets. Maybe it just felt good to tell everyone about his chops. Poor guy probably catches a shitstorm of hate with every episode, so maybe he needed this lengthy intro just to re-establish that he isn't some fly-by-night.

It took 17 minutes for Jonas to get to the first piece of actual meat in this whole conversation, which was something a "continued influence effect." That’s a fact refers to people's tendency to cling to information, even if it has been discredited. Merely being given incorrect info first means you're more likely to remember it over any subsequent corrective information. The example Sam chooses for this effect was the McMartin preschool sexual abuse debacle, which was a fascinating story and a gigantic warning flag to the nation, and yet he didn’t mention any of its most interesting facts. For a fuller account on this, I refer you to this article in Wikipedia.

The next phenomenon they discuss is the tendency to lean toward a positive statement rather than the negative one. It is easier to agree that 2+2 = 6 then it is to refute it. They also mention the “repetition effect": merely repeating a falsehood enough times makes it more likely that people think it is true. And then they discuss the hypothetical “backfire effect" which would be telling a person that his prejudice is wrong but thereby reinforcing the prejudice instead of weakening it. Only, they admit that effect and may not be real.

When Sam gets to the “fireplace effect”, however, I began to wonder if he hadn't fallen prey to one of his own delusional effects. How else can anyone say something as boldly incorrect as “fireplace smoke is just as noxious as diesel exhaust.” Hydrocarbon exhaust is laden with much more toxins than wood smoke, which you can confirm for yourself by simply googling "wood smoke toxicity" versus "diesel exhaust toxicity." It is true that both combustions also produce particulate matter, which you don't want to breathe if you can avoid it. But you don't get dangerous levels of PM from a wood fire inside your fireplace.

The most interesting discussion in the podcast is on the difference between emotion and logic, and how our brains cannot distinguish between the two different “modes of thought" and they are not so sure are really different modes of thought. Sam mentions the wishful thinking fallacy as something which scientists constantly have to guard against, whence double blind studies, control groups and all that.

They also discuss the high social cost of changing your beliefs, with examples of a closet atheist who is a church preacher, and a conservative think-tank employee who became a liberal. They discuss the freeing of prejudices that a person can experience by practicing mindfulness techniques. It is easier to reject an inconvenient truth when you learn to recognize the emotional effect it has on you.

I particularly liked Sam’s discussion of how to distinguish between healthy skepticism and being a wacko conspiracist nutjob. The wacko does not build a model of explanation, but merely questions the plausibility of random facts or coincidences. He can't try to explain how his theory could work--say, how the government would have blown up its own world trade center--because any positive statement can be disproved. So instead, he says stuff like, "Isn’t it an unlikely coincidence that the Air Force happen to be mostly offshore doing training exercises that day?" As opposed to a skepticist who, say, questions CIA involvement in South America, and builds a case about how it destabilized some communist government using evidence. In that case, there is a conspiracy, but you aren't a whacko because you built an explanation of what happened, and every step of your theory can be tested with facts.

#259 The Reckoning to Come, with Balaji Srinivasan

1) I am recording these observations as I go, since this episide is 4 hours long. I'll do my best to listen to the guest, Balajit Srinivasan, with an open mind. This will be hard, because within the first few minutes he already brags about a $300 million sale of his first company, then injected some patently false modesty before crowing about his current angel investing.

2) Ugh--not the old "the age of numbers that is replacing the age of letters." If every tech guru who repeated that would only bother themselves with the letters, they would learn that this old saw has been buzzing around for the past hundred years or so.

3) In response to Sam's request for his "30,000 foot view of the world," Balaji observes that the 21st-century was the mirror image of the 20th century, because in the 20th century "the West was capitalist and the East was communist," and now in the 21st-century "the East is ethnocentrist and the West is ethnonationalist." In other words, he conflates left/right economics with left/right politics. The inability to distinguish between capitalism and racism does not bode well for one's mental clarity.

4) More intellectual fogginess: Balaji claims that Americans believe “whites are the worst.” It’s hard to imagine what minority of opinion he is using to serve to the characterize the entire country. Especially coming as he does from Silicon Valley, which has to be among the whitest major metropolitan areas in the world.

5) Another dubious claim: "the world was in a centralizing era pre-1950, but the advent of the transistor opened up everything and democratized speech." I had to laugh at that, because I have a 180 degree different take on it: there were tremendously more avenues for broadcasting your ideas before the internet than there are now. Balaji references the three big TV stations, completely ignoring that every major city in the US once had its own independent TV station. And several newspapers! Remember those? Gone! As are the thousands of independent radio stations and viable book publishers that used to exist.

I have an inkling that Balaji believes that any speech of importance can find an audience merely by posting it on Twitter, or a blog, or something. Exactly what I'm trying to do here. And I imagine some of the fifteen of you occasional readers can understand more easily than Balaji, how the fact that he can pontificate on the web and reach hundreds of thousands of eyes proves nothing about the democratization of media, proves if anything the opposite of it, requiring as it does his own rarified position in order to gain an audience of any size.

6) OMG, I can't belive Balaji called FDR a dictator. Man! Talk about devaluing the currency on THAT word. His evidence are some WPA programs which he claims were wrong-headed because they hadn't sufficiently helped recover the world economy, shattered by WWII and the Great Depression, before FDR's death. And--get this--further proof of dictatorship was the Japanese internment during WWII.

Ah, Balaji! If only you had bothered your head with more of those letters you disparage. Perhaps a real history book, rather than your tweets and memes and objectivist circle-jerk claptrap you mention several times in the interview. If you had only managed a little of a liberal arts education!

Seriously, dude, at least look at Wikipedia! The interment of the Japanese was an idea that Roosevelt considered and then rejected based on advice from his cabinet. It only happened because mobs of your beloved objectivist Californians clamored for it. FDR had to be dragged into it unwillingly. This is actually the opposite of how a dictator works.

7) The fact that Balaji so highly recommends The Sovereign Individual is an indication of just how deeply he has drunk of the Silicon-Valley-libertanian Kool-Aid. I guess I should at least give him credit for the uniformity of his convictions. Still, one shudders to think of him in some bar in Palo Alto, toasting his new purchase of a New Zealand safe room with his fellow VC, passing around copies of the book that tells how the Old World is doomed and what you need to do to still be on your feet when the New World is born.

8) Sam does a good job of pushing back on some of Balaji's wild claims, like "you can't make a fuss about illogical TSA screening or you'll miss your flight," or "the problem with the FDA is the power they wield," which in his twisted logic made them obstruct early COVID screening. But one hears from Balaji little interest in the actual facts on the ground at the FDA. And what's with the childish notion that making a stink at the airport is the best way to protest illogical TSA policy?

9) Balani says federal regulation is not about keeping big corporations in check, but about crushing their competition. Which makes it awfully hard to explain why big corporations spend billions on lobbying every year to try to get themselves deregulated. And one has to wonder what mental gymnastics Balaji needs in order to explain why, a few years after the investment banking industry managed to get Bush Jr to reduce regulation, we got the worst financial crisis in living memory. No, wait, I know--he probably thinks bitcoin is the answer ;)

10) I really had to grit my teeth at 1:03 when this nutcase tries to say that price-fixing regulation is only arbitrarily enforced. I mean, what fucking planet did this guy grow up on? How can he possibly argue, as he does very passionately, that laissez-faire capitalism is actually good for consumers?! What does he think about all the people who died from poisoned meat and tainted milk in the 1900's? Or the massacres of coal miners? Or a million other abuses of power?

11) Shit: there are still 3 hours left to this podcast, and I'm getting really sick of listening to this guy. Even though I have the playback speed set at 1.5X. I don't care how rich he is, this Balaji Srinivasan schmuck has his head so far up his ass he can see out through his own nostrils.

I'm going to suck it up and try to last through his explanation of bitcoin and blockchain. But unless something remarkable comes up, I'm quitting here. I'm sorry, I really tried to listen to this loony with an open mind. Why I failed may be an interesting subject to get into some day, but I prefer to keep this particular post focused on the contents of the actual episode.

Edited in: Good god, his inaccurate swipes against legitimate journalists are maddening.

#247 Constructing Minds, with Lisa Feldman Barrett

https://samharris.org/podcasts/247-constructing-minds/

This was one of the best podcasts aired in a few months, because Sam managed to find an expert who actually had stuff to say that was a revelation, not just some political opinion.

"Culture as operating system" isn't a particularly ground-breaking insight (and I'm not even sure how accurate the analogy is) but it lays out more clearly a critical fact: we are not freely independent hardware units, able to crunch any problem and always come up with the best possible solution. We are products of our native culture.

The "myth of the triune brain" which Lisa discusses is also interesting: I learned that the model of three separate evolutionary structures of the brain--the reptilian, or amygdala; the limbic, or emotional center; and the cerebral cortex, or hominid brain--has been discarded as inaccurate. These structures may well be identifiably different, but they aren't stages of evolution. All creatures with brains have these three structures. Ours are just differently proportioned.

Lisa says that the most important role of your brain is the regulation of your body's functions. Humans' brains have simply evolved to do more than that. Our brains all their time also analyzing current inputs (visual, smell, sound) to make a predictive model of what is going to happen next. It helped hominids survive in the Great Rift Valley, and it helps their descendants write blogs.

There's an amusing moment when Sam starts to say that something like "disgust may be a universal state of mind," and Lisa tries diplomatically to contradict that. "We have to be careful saying that," she repeats about 20 times. "Nausea is ontological, but maybe disgust isn't." Or words to that effect.

I wish I could test the concept with something like a Venn diagram of the cognitive states of people from every culture when confronted with a video of this scene which I witnessed 35 years ago as a freshman in college: I was sitting on the steps of the main quad, eating lunch with a couple of friends, and watching the daily parade of people. A large black dog stopped right in front of us and took a huge dump. To make matters worse, the poop was covered with a bright green slime. But the absolute topper--the detail which pegged out our disgust-o-meter--was when the dog turned around and proceeded to eat the entire Log 'O Green Feces right there in front of us. I confess that we expressed our revulsion in the most raucous and unequivocal way you can imagine eighteen-year-old American males would.

But maybe Lisa is right, and in Finland they would merely applaud politely. I don't know.

#244 (Food, Climate, Pandemic) & #245 (Scary Ideas)

I'm going to be blunt here. Unless you're a hardcore Sam Harris fan, like I am, I wouldn't say there was anything memorable in either of these podcasts.

In #244, we're reminded that carnivores are responsible for a lot of bad things, and we're tantalized with the possibility of animal-free meat.

In #245, we're reminded that scientists have to kowtow to political pressure, and tantalized with the possibility of a politics-free journal.

Yeah, and while we're at it, I'd like a work-free income and a hangover-free cocktail.

#246 - Police Training & Police Misconduct

I asked my brother, a cop with 20 years experience, to listen to this podcast, and he agreed that it was an excellent take on one of the biggest problems he faces on the force: lack of training in grappling with unwilling criminals.

Which I knew anyway. There are a few videos of my brother struggling with whackos out on the internet. They've gone viral, for precisely the reason Rener Gracie says: my brother is clearly struggling with people that he would have been able to easily master with just a tiny bit of training.

And the people filming these videos that went viral? One was a police-brutality numbskull who was trying to prove that all cops are pigs. It doesn't come off all that convincingly since the drug addict my brother is arresting had been terrorizing the entire street, screaming obscenities and stealing things out of shops, and then fighting with the cops before trying to run away. My brother finally succeeds in pinning him to the sidewalk and pressing the crazy man's head to the ground with his knee in order to get the cuffs on him.

Meanwhile, the best thing the young airhead filming the incident can do is complain about police brutality. And post a deceivingly edited version of it it to the internet in the delusion that he's making his point. Only my brother's department actually posted a more complete recording of the entire incident, which was pretty compelling, and clearly showed the idiocy of the original.

The other video with my brother in it was filmed by some citizen in a building across the street while my brother in an open parking lot tries to subdue a larger man who is clearly off his meds. He had been breaking into cars looking for stuff to pawn. My brother tries to get the cuffs on the guy, but loses control. A fight ensues, and then you can clearly see the man trying to grab the pistol out of my brother's holster. He yanks on it several times while my brother has him in a chokehold. Eventually the guy gives up, (the holster has a trick release for exactly this reason) and then he's cuffed. But let me tell you, that was a scary fight to watch.

Now, my brother is the first to admit that cops are called to plenty of situations that really require a social worker. And that reforming the 911 response for a lot of calls makes sense. But he completely agrees that training to help with the grappling situations would be enormously helpful, for those calls where violence is inevitable.

And here's the tragedy of the situation: although he's exactly the kind of empathetic, level-headed, fair-minded person we need on our police forces, he's sick of getting stuck between felonious addicts and brainless "anti-policing advocates" intent on portraying everything he does as "brutality." So my brother is quitting. Retiring early, at reduced pension.

I suppose that's exactly what the "defund the police" crowd want-- all cops to quit. At least, until the next felonious addict comes raging down their street.

#241: Final Thoughts on Free Won't

I have an ingrained objection to the claim that we don’t have free will. Maybe I don't have a choice in my objection because I have no free will. I guess that's what Sam would say.

Why am I so obstinate? Because in my experience, I feel I am freely willing myself to do stuff... every minute of every day. Yes, I understand that science says that's just my left brain trying to trick my consciousness into thinking that it's making the choices freely. But here's the thing. Science doesn't even know what consciousness is. So can any scientist really make a pronouncement about whether this unknown thing--the consciousness--is self-deterministic? Science agrees that something within us is making that decisions, and that we just cannot identify what the decider is. An unknowable entity Sam refers to as "the void." Or occasionally as the "puppet strings." But science doesn't identify who's on the other side of the strings. Or what in the void these random thoughts come from. And so, since science does not yet understand this part, it cannot conclude that we are not the ones in control.

Let's follow Sam's arguments, point-by-point:

1. You are a slave to environment and genes. A computer program that will always 100% be determined by them (or possibly also by something random, like a quantum probability) but never able to make a decision on your own. If somebody backed you up to exactly who you were at some previous point in your history, you would slavishly do and say exactly the same things that you did then.

Hey, here's a thought: just because science do not have a mathematics--YET--to describe a closed system that exerts self-determined choices, that does not mean that such a mathematics cannot exist. What would happen if, next week, someone were to discover a logical structure whereby the variables in a field get to choose what they do next? This might sound absurd, but if we can believe that crappy-ass theory called quantum mechanics, we ought to at least be open to the possibility of a "self-deterministic mechanics."

2. We don’t get to choose our heartbeats or how fast we metabolize food. That's a metaphor for how we have no control over which thoughts and impulses we act on.

Actually, the evidence that we don't have any control is not very convincing. Maybe I haven't heard about the best proof yet. I've heard about a few studies that were done where the scientists present a subject with different choices and ask him to pick one, but have predeterminedly rigged his ability to choose—via some trick like mood music or other environmental influence. They ask him to explain why he made his choice, and the subject’s left brain comes up with some BS answer, sometimes even a completely disprovable one. So the scientists conclude from this that our every action is determined by fixed factors like genes or environment, and our left brains simply go along making up stories about why we do what we do so as to provide us with the comfortable illusion that we have free will.

Anyway, just because it’s possible to manipulate a subject into picking one photograph over another without understanding why, it does not logically result that we have zero ability to control our choices. So I posit the existence of a possibility which Sam doesn't consider: that even if you, the listener, have some mysterious entity, the "void" that Sam refers to, which gives you a menu of options, there is still the "you" that Sam objects to, the "observer by the stream," who makes the choice.

3. Our morality improves if we stop believing in free will.

Obviously, this isn't a proof of anything, and he wasn't trying to use it as one. After all, if Sam would only believe in God, then he would get the happy vision of heaven. But that isn't a logical proof of God's existence.

Besides, it's possible to imagine a society which does not brutishly torture and hate criminals, but works on rehabilitating and helping them, without having to stop believing in free will. In fact, even this heathen recognizes that this is the essence of Christianity.

4. We are not the authors of our thoughts, but they simply arise within us.

Which is to say, he doesn’t know where they come from, and so he is prescribing them to some unknowable force, and postulating that this force has nothing to do with our conscious decision-making ability. So here I again push back: this kind of Aristotelian “guessing about how a system works when you don’t really know” is exactly the sort of behavior that scientists should eschew. It is nothing more than neurologist hubris.

5. There is no "observer by the stream of consciousness" based on meditation experience, since a meditator will observe thoughts arrive which are not of his/her making.

This is a ball of wax which I don’t want to get into here, so for now, all I'll do is re-phrase: is it an illusion to believe that a surfer has any control (free will) over her surfing, since the waves are not of her own making? Obviously, not. She chooses which wave to ride. She has some control over which way she rides it. Just so, her ability to choose which thought to act upon is there, even if she isn't in control of the generation of those thoughts.

Suppose you choose to think about flowers. It's your anniversary, and you’ve made a conscious choice: "think about flowers for my Honey." Sam may be right that you don't get to choose whether images of irises or Cala lilies appear in your mind next. But it is still true that you have made a larger choice of the activity in general, and that has controlled at least which types of images will come next. You didn't generate those waves, but you did choose to go surfing for flowers in the first place. Sam would only be correct that you have no free will to think any thoughts if you tried to think about flowers but the next thought that cames into your head was, say, Charles Murray.

6. “If your next thought is ‘what the hell is Sam talking about?’ what I am talking about is that you didn’t choose that next thought."

Ah-ha, Sam, but I would claim that we have exerted already our free will by choosing to listen to your question. And so, even if our specific reaction may not have been one we chose, the class of reactions that we had to pick from are a result of our conscious choice--our free will, choosing to continue to listen.

Of course, Sam might object that we are deluded if we think we have the choice to continue to listen to him--that is just an illusion and in reality some hidden thinker is making the choice for us. That our sneaky left brain is telling us sweet little lies and giving us the illusion that we have made the choice ourselves with our own free will.

His reason to think so is because he--and science in general--can't figure out who the "hidden thinker" could be. Since empirical science does not know how consciousness works, therefore it is an illusion. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but so much of this podcast really does boil down to this one--very weak--point.)

7. We experience the illusion of free will. We feel ourselves making choices and wrongly believe that we have authorship of them. We are not the observer standing by the stream of consciousness, because there is no observer, only the stream.

In our finite and dim understanding of the structure of the universe, we don't understand how it is possible for matter to have agency. We don’t know where consciousness comes from--we have not solved the hard problem. We don’t know why electrons can choose to interact before they are even created. Or how matter bends space-time. Or why it even exists at all. Pretty much all we know are a few simplistic mathematical models only invented in the last hundred years. So I'm not drinking this kool-aid here. If every possible response that I can think of to the next moment of my life feels like is within my power to choose, this overwhelming preponderance of evidence that I have free will trumps whatever mystical experience you had in yoga, or on quaaludes, or whatever, Sam-o.

8. Think of a movie, and observe that since your mind comes up with movies unbidden, this is evidence of the lack of free will.

In my surfer metaphor, we are out bobbing in the waves of consciousness, and the first wave we free-will choose to ride is whether to go along with his challenge and think of a movie at all. Maybe we'll be contrary and think of something else, instead, like a City. But okay, now we're on the movie wave he threw at us. And now we see that someone else--the Void? Or even Sam; it doesn't matter--has split our wave into two parts, a Chinatown part and an Alien part. So we choose. He then says that it isn't really us who chooses, because that fits his deterministic view of the universe.

But I say back that a choice was made, and he can't prove that it wasn't us that made it. Indeed, if you think about it, the argument that we don’t really make any choices of our own free will but instead merely adopt choices made by some kind of neurological "black box" is reminiscent of those kinds of spooky models of existence that aboriginal philosophers used to make about why volcanoes erupt or how the moon and the sun split up. And any self-respecting empiricist ought to try to avoid such "gremlins in the closet" pseudo-physics.

9. We didn't create ourselves.

Okay. But I don't see how this has any logical bearing on whether we have free will.

10. We don’t get to choose whether we're interested enough to learn Mandarin. Or collect rocks.

The fact that we exert the free will to not collect rocks is not an argument that we don’t have free will. If anything, it's exactly opposite: it is the very definition of free will. And Sam's demanding why we don't choose to be interested in Madarin? Interestingly, this is almost exactly a choice I did make, eight years ago, when I began to study Russian. Which I consider to be a triumph of my own free will.

11. Brain damage (Charles Whitman) can cause people to lose control.

This is not convincing either. The fact that it is harder to maintain free will in a damaged brain doesn't mean that undamaged brains aren't capable of exerting free will.

I'll skip the last third of the episode, on the moral implications of not believing in free will. It's not relevant to the question of whether free will exists.

#238, #239 & # 240: Physics, Humor, and Poetry

You might wonder why I'm lumping these three very different podcasts together in one review: #238, How to Build a Universe, is a conversation with Frank Wilczek, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist. #239, with Ricky Gervais, is an amusing phone call about humor, among other things. And #240, The Boundaries of Self, is another conversation with famous poet David Whyte.

Well, let's have a quick look at each in turn:

Physics
Matter is made of quarks and leptons. We don't know what there is outside of the boundary of the universe. And time is a field like space only not really.

All of this was well-known decades ago, when I was a physics student. But after getting a doctorate in quantum field theory, I left the field completely, and rarely turned back. So I was excited by the possibility that in this podcast I could learn if anything interesting has been discovered since My day.

Sadly, the answer is, "no."

Oh, there’s dark matter. 85% of the universe is dark matter. We didn’t used to know much about that. And now, in contrast we can say...

Nothing, actually. They still know nothing about dark matter. 85% of the universe, and we can't see it, we can't detect it, we can't say anything about it. In fact, the only reason we think it's there is because, if it isn't, then somebody (Einstein?) got something terribly wrong.

Humor
Ricky Gervais is back--three times, actually. And he has plenty of funny things to say. I laughed often in the course of each of his phone chats with Sam. Wouldn't all of us love to able to call up Sam and ask him something like, "What are dreams for?"

I particularly appreciate his musing about the very nature of humor, because, as a writer of fiction, I often wonder what I can do to give a scene more levity. How to find the humor of a situation. The funny (ahem) thing about Ricky, though, is that despite his deep intelligence, one does not get the feeling that one has experienced anything substantial or profound after hearing him. He comes off as complete inconsequential fluff.

Poetry
And David Whyte is back, after the original appearance in February of 2020, and also an appearance in the Waking Up app. As a bit of a disclaimer, I will acknowledge that I didn't think much of his "headless wonder" podcast #184 with Sam. And perhaps because of that, the first time I played the new episode, it sounded more like the Buddhist aisle of a Hallmark store than anything I'd call poetry. But then I thought maybe I'd been letting Ricky Gervais rub off on me, and maybe that was just too snarky. So I waited a week and came back and to replay the episode.

But the second time around, the main thing which struck me is how everyone with a British accent has this immediate unfair advantage--at least, to the American ear. There's something about it which makes the speaker sound so erudite and profound. They could just be reading their flipping grocery list, and you want to give them the Nobel Prize for lit'rachor.

So, in an effort to be fair, I'm putting in writing a few quotes from the conversation. If these strike you as profound without the benefit of hearing them read in his Yorkshire/Irish lilt, then I will concede that there really was something there:

Regret
Regret is a frontier to your future.
I find it useful to choose a moment in my life that I regret, and use it as a pair of eyes and ears to pay attention to the future.

Friendship
Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.

Honesty
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.

Ambition
Ambition may be essential for the young, but becomes the essential obstacle for the any attempt at a mature life... The ease of having an ambition is that it can be readily explained to others. The very DIS-ease of is that it can be so easily explained to others... What is worthy of a life's dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence.

You will decide for yourself whether this sort of sentiment is indeed as profound as it sounds out loud. Personally, I found much to nitpick about the these snippets, and plenty more to object to in the essays Whyte read from in this podcast. I do concede that it's very hard to construct a monologue consisting entirely of profound observations. I'm sure I would be much worse at it than Whyte is.

One final observation: I didn't find anything in this conversation to fit my definition of poetry, namely: heightened languange and metaphor that leads to a more profound experience. It might well be that if there was a more poetic and less prosaic thrust to this whole conversation, then I'd have felt a little bit less like I was listening to John Cleese reading corporate inspirational posters from the 1980s.

#234, The Divided Mind, with Ian McGilchrist

The last few Making Sense podcasts have felt... well, shall we say, below par. I mean, how interesting is it to interview someone whose claim to fame is that she was right about the pandemic before other people were? Or a guy who says that violent insurrection may be bad for democracy?

But this episode more than makes up for that dry spell!

Not that I had any problem with the content of the previous guests or their conversations—indeed, if I could have run into any of them and had those exact conversations, that probably would have been the highlight of my life. Or at least of the past few years. I don't run with such a distinguished crowd, I guess. Those episodes did have plenty of what I love most about listening to Sam Harris: erudition, common sense, and insight. The problem was, the guests just weren't that illuminating.

On the other hand, this Ian fellow has some intriguing and surprising knowledge to share. And, as his expertise is how the brain works, it is all not only revelatory, but impactful.

Ian's latest book covers the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. It is called The Master and His Emissary and he discusses some highlights on this podcast. Spoiler alert: the popular understanding of those differences—which I shared until yesterday—that the left brain handles reasoning and language, and the right brain is the seat of creativity? Misconception!

A lot of the discussion was based on case studies and medical history. They discuss strokes in the left brain which were no big deal—survivors were able to carry on pretty much as usual. But the right-brain strokes were debilitating—survivors had trouble making sense of the world.

Let's go back to that misconception that the left brain is logical, and the right brain is creative. Ian says both sides have creativity and both have logic, and the correct thing is not to ask what each side does, but rather, how.

But we don’t get to this immediately; we have to wade through an enormous interruption. Eventually we learn the how: the left brain is the spotlight and the right brain is the whole stage. Or, put it another way, the right brain is the master, and the left brain his emissary. Ian proposes the hypothesis that this distribution of function evolved from lower animals who needed to be able to focus on prey (left brain) while at the same time remaining aware of possible predators (right brain).

Another fascinating datuum is that the left brain, without the benefit of the right brain's context, cannot be trusted. Because what the left half doesn't understand, it makes up explanations which to an outsider can look completely nonsensical. Ian gives the example of someone after a right-brain stroke explaining that the immobile left hand next to them belongs to someone else, rather than recognize it as their own.

Other fascinating questions arise: for one, are we actually two distinct consciousnesses, one for each hemisphere? In which case we are only aware of one or the other at any given moment? Sam finds it "spooky" to imagine an unconscious self constantly looking over the shoulder of your conscious self. Another question: what is it like to be only your left brain? Or your right brain?

And some surprising facts come out: animals' brains are all divided in two, for all mammals and birds and reptiles, on down to fairly unevolved critters. Here's another curiosity: there's no connecting neurons in lower vertebrates (corpus callosum, in humans). Why not? It's also fascinating that if part of the human brain dies and facility is lost, the brain can teach itself to perform that function using a different part that doesn’t usually do it.

Finally, there are fascinating metaphysical discussed about whether the brain attenuates consciousness or propagates it? And what happens to our consciousness when we die?

They skirt a few times the issue of Dunning-Kruger incompetence and the recent veering of western civilization toward the jingoistic left brain and away from the nuanced right brain. The glaringly orange elephant in the room and his delusional followers are only obliquely mentioned, as well as the punishingly simplistic "wokerism." Ian points out that when a society fails, it is because things veer too far to the left brain, which is not able to recognize the interconnectedness of the society, but instead is all about grasping and acquiring and rationalizing the greediness with insane justifications.

I don't know about you, but I find it comforting to contemplate the current downward slide of western civilization as a mere artifact of the human brain. In a way, it kind of absolves any of us of responsibility.

#232 Inequality and Revolution with Jack Goldstone

Jack Goldstone is historical sociologist whose studies have focused on revolutions. I think he's great--I agreed with him on pretty much every point he made, even when he was contradicting Sam.

He told Sam the reason revolutions happen is not because the rich get too much richer, per se, but rather that their motivations change from helping their society to mere self-enrichment. Because the rest of the population does not care so much about the increase in wealth of the rich--we don't care about their gold plated toilets or million-dollar yachts--but we do care if we find that we are working harder amd harder for less benefit. When enough of the population decides that the system is no longer working for anyone but the elites, then conditions are ripe for a revolt.

Jack said this inequality of living conditions is higher now in the US than it has been since the 1800s.

He also pointed out that a map of the US counties that Trump carried in 2016 almost perfectly overlaps the counties whose populations experienced a decline in life expectancy in the past 20 years. (It's worth noting that both Sam and Jack draw a connection between voting for Trump and participating in a revolution of sorts.)

The precursors to the life expectancy decline were, of course, loss of real wages and diminished employment opportunities in those counties. The system was no longer working for them. And so people in those counties have an image of greedy elites on the coasts hoarding and off-shoring their wealth at the expense of the rest of the country.

Sam asked Jack if increasing taxes on the wealthy is the right approach to solving that problem. He pointed out that a common argument against paying taxes is that government doesn’t work well. Though he observes that's really only an argument to improve government and not for wealthy people to stop paying taxes. But Jack didn't go there with Sam. Instead, he mentioned three things that need to happen before we can expect people to willingly pay higher taxes.
1: Convince people that government is capable of effective action (like we used to believe in the 1950s, when the government built the highway systems, developed vaccines, and such).
2: Elites need to work together and find common ground for improvements instead of merely dividing into two political camps and competing against each other.
3: We need people to feel that the tax system is fair and that the middle class are not paying a greater percentage than the rich.

They turned to the question of the flight of high-tech out of California, and Jack took a point of view that I share, that the recent flight of certain high-tech companies from California should not be a cause for concern for Californians left behind, for three reasons.
1: The impact on California may be positive if real estate prices go back down into the range of the rational.
It's better for the California economy--as well as the economy of the whole country--if one industry isn't too concentrated and powerful here.
3: Finally, let them leave! Those of us left behind in the Bay Area won't be losing much if the people leaving have a higher commitment toward their own personal greed than toward a functional society with a diverse and robust urban experience.

Jack wasn't enthusiastic about Sam's pet project of UBI. But he did like the same thing I do: a mandatory universal service program where everyone at 18 goes into the military or the peace corps or the social services for something for a year. Jack added that after that, everyone can get paid a chunk of money like $30k for their time, and to set them on the road toward their futures. I hadn't considered that possibility before but that's a nice idea!

One last note I'll make is that I think Jack's spot on that all of these talking heads referencing the progress of the Dow Jones as though that were the measure of anything fundamental to the US economy are all deluded. The stock market is no longer best measure of quality of life in the US. It now mostly reflects the financial and tech sectors, which are not big employers, and does not give a picture of the health of manufacturing or services or even employement, as we have seen in this recent COID blow to the economy which was not reflected in the Dow.

Against Conservatism

Background
Let us, for the sake of argument, imagine that human history has been a game of tug-a-war between progressives and conservatives at work in the creation of an idea which we call history. The progressives would have been those talking their fellow primates down from the trees. Teaching the rest of the hunter-gatherer tribe to cultivate crops in a time of diminishing game. And overthrowing any despots who rose up among them.

The conservatives, we might imagine, would be those who insisted that peace with a hungry pride of lions was not going to work, or who helped their tribe prevail against another pushing for anarchy. And the conservatives would be the ones who kept the spears sharp so they did not starve when the crops failed.

Given this narrative, it is understandable that the current fashion is to applaud the balance of the conservative and the progressive in society, and to opine that it is perhaps for the best that we have both types in our society, as surely the balance between the two is the golden mean, like the brake pedal and the accelerator which are both needed to keep the bus of state from crashing through the guardrails of history and plummeting down the cliff of darwinian unfitness.

That may well be the case, though it is a leap of faith. Just as it is a leap to claim that the conservatives are nothing but a hindrance, that the bus doesn’t need a brake. But either way, the valid follow-up question to ask is, does the brake have to be applied with the same force and frequency as the accelerator?

For the fact is that the conservative plays an outsized role in hindering human happiness throughout the course of every culture as it evolves from the poor to wealthy. Indeed, it is a tautology that every civilization’s rulers evolve from autocrat to oligarch to kleptocrat. They winnow their own ruling ranks to a smaller and smaller minority, and still strip an increasingly onerous share of the wealth from the population. When these oligarchs--warlords, nobility, emperors, or party leaders, the titles matter not--exceed some tipping point, it is by definition the progressives who lead the yoked masses into revolt, and the conservatives who, by definition, continue to support them.

Let us consider for a brief moment the three different means by which the oligarchs cling to power: compulsion, corruption, and confusion.

Compulsion
When the grip on power is primarily through violence. The reign only lasts until the leader or one of his heirs slips up, and is overthrown by a popular plurality.

Corruption
Maintaining power by co-opting certain leaders within the peasantry, rather than the more expensive and tenuous means of violence. Though this is an unstable arrangement, and inevitably ends in an uprising of unanimous opposition.

Confusion
The most sophisticated means of maintaining an oligarchy. This method requires propaganda: obfuscation and lies. Historically, the propaganda comes as either a heaven or a utopia. The former celebrates the noble sacrifice of the masses and promises them their rewards in some fictional afterlife. There may be 72 virgins, or a reincarnation to a higher being, or a promised seat at the right hand of the divinity. To an outsider, it is surprising how effective these fictions work as a very real force among the credulous populace.

In contrast, the Utopian oligarchs do not invoke a supernatural power, but rather some Camelot, some Bolshevik Dream where premier and serf will one day be brothers. As with the heaven myth, an outside will laugh at how the population was duped by a dream so implausible.

Though the Utopian and the Heavenly confusion take opposite promises of Eden now or Eden later, they both share the common trait that they are carried out of necessity by a faction of the society which we identify as the conservative, and are opposed by the opposing faction, the progressive.

It is worth taking pains to note that, after the revolution, the conservative faction may actively try to restore power to the deposed autocrat. This is a feature not enjoyed by those who rule by compulsion or corruption.

Progressive versus Conservative
Webster’s defines conservatism as “a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.” They define a progressive as “one believing in moderate political change, and especially social improvement by government action.” So the progressive and the conservative hold opposing views about whether society can be legislated into improvement.

The Liberal: An Aside
Let’s eliminate any possible confusion between a “liberal” and a “progressive.” A liberal, by definition, is a person with a free mind--libera mentis--not wedded to the status quo. When the status quo works better for the whole society than what the progressive advocates, then the liberal and conservative will agree in opposing the progressive. An obvious example from the past century is the repeal of prohibition. A current example would be the hue by some radical progressives to defund the police, a cause not taken up by most liberals.

In this definition, a “liberal” is an undeniably good thing, apolitical and uncontroversial to any but the cultist who resents freedom of thought.

Modern Conservatism
By definition, the modern conservative believes that society has already reached--or gone beyond--the optimal society. Things are just fine right now, or things were better back in some golden age, but they will definitely not be improved by authorizing the government to impose some do-gooder’s will on us.

Consider the decreasing number of people in the US who own an increasingly greater share of all wealth--the tautology mentioned earlier. The progressive aims to reverse this trend, which unchecked will turn our country into a feudal state of autocrats and serfs. It is, of course, true that there will always be certain people through luck or hard work who get wealthy faster than the general populace. This only becomes a societal ill when the consolidation of wealth occurs out of all proportion to the value of the autocrats. And the US is indisputably at that point now. For example, most of the wealth of the Walmart enterprise goes to the Walton family, and yet they do not contribute even a tiny fraction of the value of their minimum-wage, benefit-deprived employees. The intelligent observer--the liberal--cannot view this situation as optimal, and so is constrained to agree with the progressive that reform is needed. The conservative will disagree, with some noise about heirs’ rights and dark imprecations against communism. He will attempt to convince everyone that an iceberg is a cloudbank, and hope the ship of state can steam right through it. But reality is apolitical: in a hundred years, our heirs will be paddling around in tiny lifeboats and wondering what the hell we were thinking.

Or consider the current status quo of reduced opportunities for women and minorities: the conservative take is that any attempt to improve this disparity by political will is likely to make things worse for the population as a whole. The progressive take is that this can and should be fixed. And a liberal will freely consider both arguments and side with the one he finds most compelling.

The same with education, the environment, and so on: the progressive wants to fix what he considers broken, the conservative wants to preserve what he considers optimal, and the liberal considers both sides of each argument and makes the most reasoned, most intelligent, decision based on his unprejudiced view.

So how did it happen that conservatives in the modern US chose to demonize their opponents with the epithet of “liberal”? For he has accused his enemy of being less prejudiced and more clear-minded than himself!

The answer is exactly as bad as you might think. Defective cogitation.

1. Compromised Intelligence
The hallmark of the conservative is that he believes in the irrational myths of the priests and/or the ideologues. By teaching him an absurd lie before he is old enough to defend his own brain against the attack, they have planted a virus of irrationality. Thus, grown men can believe the impossible fable of a crucified Jew who is magically resurrected and will be coming back... any day now. Even though it's been 2,000 years. Or that social democracy, the preferred system for the hundreds of millions of people in the most prosperous countries in the world, is somehow worse than the cold amorality of raw capitalism.

Once the first virus of irrtionality within the conservative is installed, it is much easier for authorities to short-circuit rational thinking at will: the Han people are inferior. Jews are trying to rule the world. A coup in some distant country will save its people from Communism.

Indeed, the authorities can choose exactly the opposite line and the conservatives will believe that, too--it’s all fiction anyway: The Han are the master race. Communism is the only salvation for the masses. The Jews are the chosen people.

Another symptom of a conservative’s compromised intelligence may occur when he recognizes the validity of a solution pushed by progressives, but doesn’t care because the end of the world is coming. Who needs to improve on society if the chosen will be raptured into Paradise, anyway?

2. Empathy Deficit
Not all conservatives have a deficit in intelligence. Some, perhaps smart enough to know better, nonetheless chose conservatism out of an inability to empathize with the less fortunate.

There are many well-known instances of a conservative politician who has railed against the immorality of sex outside of a marriage until the day he was found out in his extramarital affair. Or outed as gay. Then his years of preaching bigotry and intolerance are bookended by tearful pleas for forgiveness.

When a conservative suddenly discovers she is in the very population that she has been preaching against, she can either double down on the hatred and intolerance and claim to be reformed, or she can grow from the experience. If she learns to see the cruelty of her intolerance, then the tendrils of a newly liberal mind can emerge from the cracked facade of her ideology, and she can learn empathy. The anti-discrimination laws she has fought against for her whole career finally begin to make sense to her, though not for her furious ex-followers.

And yet, if exposure to empathy is all that an intelligent conservative needs in order to see the error of her ways, then why are there still so many who are unreformed? It is because they haven’t broken through the bubble of their dogma. They’ve never been to a public-health clinic and talked to the very people who pure capitalism is neglecting. They won’t go to the border and meet any real-life refugee to learn what conditions he is escaping. And when they do look into an inner-city ghetto, they are blinded by their dogma to do no more than look down upon them. For the enemy of empathy is antipathy.

3. A Poverty of Vision
Are there any conservatives in the contemporary US who are neither feeble-minded nor heard-hearted? Yes, there is one other group of adherents to backwardness and prejudice; those so-called “objectivists” who, from a defective understanding, believe that everyone is the sole captain of their successes.

In the world-view of their libertarian arrogance, the best of all possible worlds is meritocracy which rewards only those people who have inherently successful qualities. The diligent and the smart get to rake in all that they can, and damn the rest. Any government attempts to level the playing field, or help the downtrodden, is wrong-headed because it subsidizes incompetence.

People of this mindset believe that those who earn a low wage are responsible for their poverty because they are stupid or lazy. Even if they work for sixty hours a week, even if they grew up in a pocket of violence or poor opportunity. They take the anecdotal data that one person found a way to rise above such adverse origins, and foolishly extrapolate that everyone should be able to.

These naive people can’t recognize that the quality of their lives depends on the very government services they despise: they drive on publicly funded roads, they hire people educated at government schools, their privileged position in society is guaranteed by a publicly funded police force. Their very excrement, which in their madness they seem to take for treasure, is hauled away by the very “uneducated and lazy” whom they consider unworthy of any largesse.

It is a sad truth of human nature that we none of us enjoy confronting the shortcomings of our limited brainpower. Show an objectivist the destruction that will logically ensue from cutting the social safety net, and you will be witness to startlingly gymnastic illogic. Suggest that the libertarian ideal he worships already exists under the warlords of Afghanistan, and his slippery denialism will make the ice sheets of Dinali seem like a walk in the park.

These meritocrats simply haven’t connected the dots on how many fantastic advantages they enjoy which they were not responsible for. Of course, they have worked hard, they have sacrificed. But their mistake is thinking that’s the end of the story. They take for granted that they won the best lottery of all simply by being born with certain gifts: mental fitness, and a capacity for achievement. They also don’t consider the economic and social advantages they inherited. They have no idea how many people below the poverty line actually work harder then they, but never have the same combination of privilege, of intelligence, of physical blessings and of luck, and so were not able to monetize their efforts as advantageously.

The Conservative in the Modern US
In the modern US, a person adopts a conservative worldview because he lacks one or more of the three mental attributes: intelligence, empathy, or vision. This is why they stand in opposition to liberalism, which is synonymous with free thinking, understanding, and lack of prejudice.

Let us test the validity of this observation by evaluating the relationship of the Conservative to his society. In doing so, we will hold the following four boons to be self-evident:

Life: access to health care, right to self-preservation, protection of weak or poor, and protection of young and defenseless.
Liberty: freedom of occupation, of thought, of spirituality
The Pursuit of happiness: equal opportunity to earn wealth, equal treatment by race/gender/religion, equal rights independent of ability/merit/position
Environment: livability of cities, cleanliness of air and water and land, stability of climate.

We all would rather live with these blessings rather than be deprived of any of them, and so we have a common language for judging the stewardship of the country under the progressive versus the conservative.

Metric: the recent Candidates
Compare the policies of recent US presidential contests. In the past fifty years, they have been:

Year	Contest	Scores
		Life	Liberty	Purs Hap	Environ
1972	McGovern v Nixon	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-1
1976	Carter v Ford	1-1	1-1	1-1	1-0
1980	Carter v Reagan	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
1984	Mondale v Regan	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
1988	Dukakis v Bush	1-1	1-1	1-0	1-1
1992	Clinton v Bush	1-1	1-1	1-0	1-1
1996	Clinton v Dole	1-1	1-1	1-1	1-1
2000	Gore v G W Bush	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2004	Kerry v G W Bush	1-0	1-1	1-1	1-0
2008	Obama v McCain	1-0	1-1	1-1	1-1
2012	Obama v Romney	1-0	1-1	1-1	1-1
2016	H Clinton v Trump	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2020	Biden v Trump	1-0	1-0	1-0	1-0

It cannot be a coincidence that the left fielded not only a higher score on every one of these elections, but generally candidates of greater intelligence than the right. In some cases the difference was so great as to be laughable: Carter studied nuclear engineering in college while Ford played football. Trump was so famously incompetent that the Maga Hat is now a symbol of idiocy.

Where educational differences weren’t so stark, this bears out in the candidate’s ability to grasp major issues of the time: McGovern figured out that the US had to get out of Vietnam before Nixon did. Mondale tried to warn us all of the folly of Reaganomics, which we now understand quadrupled the deficit. Clinton got that too, but Bush didn’t. Neither did George W, whose revived Reaganomics threw the US economy into the worst recession since WWII. Obama presided over a successful rebuilding of the economy that Romney warned wouldn’t work.

In the case of Dukakis versus Bush, there’s not an obvious distinction. Same with Obama versus McCain. But since the question is the intelligence of candidates as a whole on the right versus the left, let’s extend the comparison from the presidential candidates to combinations of president/vice-president. If you do that Bush is greatly dragged down by Quayle, and McCain by Palin.

Metric: Use of Science
In the modern-day United States, there is no a priori philosophical reason why progressives or conservatives should disagree on the question of climate change. After all, there is no party relationship to other natural phenomena like hurricanes or wildfires. So why should the unanimity of scientists and rising tide of evidence behind our understanding of Global Warming evoke this schism? It is because the conservative’s cognition is damaged.

There is enormous wealth within the fossil-fuel industry, and they needed a political force to protect them. They found an amenable ally in the party endowed with less intelligence and greater susceptibility to mythology. The conservative was easier to convince to take a position against a rising tide of global data, against a virtual unanimity of the world’s scientists, and even against their own senses. They believe instead a handful of unqualified talk-show hosts and in those politicians demonstrably on the oil-company dole.

Metric: Historical Decisions
In the history of the United States, there is a clear pattern of social improvement by progressives. At each stop of the way, opposition, when it case, came from the conservatives, starting from the American Revolution itself, an act of rebellion by radical patriots (progressives) against conservatives (loyalists).

A century later, the Republican Party’s first president, Lincoln, opposed the then-reactionary Democratic party. He accomplished many progressive goals, including abolishing slavery, guaranteeing the right to vote, expanding federal power, as well as funding the transcontinental railroad, the state university system, and the settlement of the West. Fellow republican Teddy Roosevelt, the last of the progressive Republicans, regulated many monopolies, increased the National Park system, and regulated the meat and dairy industries.

How did two Republicans accomplish such progressive agendas? The simple answer is that the Republican party was then the party of progressives and not conservatives. That flip-flopped when Republican sponsors of the western settlement found more lucrative support from the big banks and railroads who had grown wealthy from the expansion, in opposition to the small farms and settlers whom they farmed like so much cattle.

Thus, it was the Democratic party who took up the cause of the small (white, let's be clear) farmer and white settler, in order to run against the Republicans. And so Democrats began to championed the causes of the working man--the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, and Income Tax--in opposition to the pro-business Republicans. Teddy’s cousin, FDR, ushered in the age of the modern Democratic Party with the creation of Income Tax, Social Security, Welfare, and the Minimum Wage.

Note that racism is not considered in this analysis. Up until the civil rights movement of the 60's, it's probably fair to say that both parties were equally racist.

Counterpoint: Trolling the Conservative And Progressive
When a hostile foreign head of state--Putin--wanted to bombard social media with fake news in an attempt to divide the populace and turn an impending election toward a result favorable to him, whom did he target as the softer-minded, the less intellectually robust, and the more gullible dupes to his troll farms?

Actually, Putin targeted both the left and the right. Or, more precisely, he targeted certain radical fringes of both: on the left, the Kremlin sponsored Nigerian troll farms to fan the flames of distrust in the cause of Black Lives Matter, and also created a fake UK group, Peace Data, to convince leftists in the US that candidate Biden was too conservative for their support.

On the right, Russia sponsored NAEBC, a Group that attacked Biden and Black Lives Matter, and defended Trump and homicidal vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. After Facebook and Twitter shut down that group, the Russians moved to the new alt-right platforms Parler and Gab, where they have been active in peddling false hyper-partisan hate speech and a campaign of lies.

To be fair, we should remind ourselves that it is within the natural bounds of human nature to want to believe disinformation. It was not that long ago, from an evolutionary standpoint, that every rustle of grass on the savannah might be a hungry lion. Without our capacity for easy gullibility, the species might well have perished, naked and unarmed, on the plains of the Greater Rift a million years ago. This may be enough to explain the hysteria of either fringe.

Counterpoint: Unanimity of Conservatives and Progressives
In some cases, a societal improvement is recognized as transcending politics. Consider the existential threat to all of humanity posed by the nuclear arsenal. Johnson began the process of arms reduction, but it was Reagan and then Bush who achieved the greatest reductions. Obama cut the remaining arsenal in half again.

The Affordable Care Act, though enacted along strict party lines, is a program based on the model of Massachusetts Republican governor Mitt Romney. It now enjoys support by a majority of both conservative and progressive citizens, and its only real opposition comes from Republican officials taking huge payouts from the health care industry.

Civil rights for all races and both sexes is also resoundingly supported by citizens of all ideologies. There remain, of course, differences of opinion about further work needed to reduce economic disparity and long-term "soft" racism and sexism, but at least we as a country seem to have managed to pull our heads out of the disturbingly ass-backward beliefs of the pre-1960s.

Most glaringly, all of the major wars which the US engaged in were roundly supported by both parties, an indication perhaps of the faint connection between ideology and patriotism.

Other issues of national importance championed not only by both progressive but also conservatives citizenry include the National Park system, the national highway system, the system for national education, and protection and regulation of the agricultural industry.

Counterpoint: Issues where Conservatives are Right
There do exist issues in which progressives exhibit of a kind of willful mass blindness. This is not new--progressives were enamored of Trotskyism in the 1920s, blind to the genocides and despotism in the Soviet Union. Also, many progressives did not support entering WWII, believing in a policy of isolationism.

In modern times, in their dedication to preserving reproductive rights, many progressives oppose any restrictions on abortions, even in the case of a viable foetus who could be removed from the womb and survive, rather than be grusomely killed and dismembered.

And it is true that many progressives are hostile to even limited gun rights, blind to the necessities of self-protection that people outside of their affluent bubbles might experience. Conservatives are not susceptible to this position, no doubt in part because so many of them receive massive financial and political support from the NRA. But in fact many conservatives live in rural areas where the response time of the police force is not short enough to afford any real security.

Finally, there is a current misunderstanding among many progressives that most police are at least subconsciously racist, and in a confrontation with the police, a black man is more likely to be killed than a white man. Not only is this not borne out by statistics, but in fact the opposite conclusion was reached in at least one important survey done by a black researcher who could not believe his results: and yet it is the white arrestee who is more likely to be killed.

This is complicated by the fact that black men are arrested in far greater proportion, which may well be the result of racism. Nevertheless, the progressive response is to riot every time a black man is killed by police and to ignore every killing of white arrestees.

Conclusions
Progressives are, on the average, more intelligent, empathetic, and have a more accurate vision of reality than conservatives. What conclusions may we then draw? Should not we progressives, in keeping with our higher plane of motivation, turn the other cheek and suffer the fools?

No. We should speak truth whenever we recognize it.

But we should do so with the humility of the true liberal, who acknowledges his limitations and the inherent equality of all men, regardless of sex, race, or--yes--ability.

And we can take comfort that there is a progressive trend in human history away from the troglodytes and toward the globalists, the inhabitants of the green tech economy, the post-war global economy, the guardians of the individual, and of the refugee. The steward of the endangered species, and the toxic waste, and the international economy must inevitably carry the day, or we doom ourselves.

America was once the liberal beacon to the rest of the world. And hopefully one day we will again catch up with those countries leading in this noble pursuit. Even with the conservatives slowing us down. We may need them. After all, who else will there be to save us from the hubris of the next shiny new Bolshevik revolution?