Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all going to shit

Listening to Sam Harris and thinking… hmm.

Last week, Sam Harris’ conversation with Rich Roll popped up on my podcast feed. The title of the episode grabbed my attention, and I started listening. It wasn’t disappointing. The conversation had many interesting threads, so I figured I’d share them here.

Sam Harris is a well-known public intellectual, often described as a philosopher and a neuroscientist, though I don’t know enough about his work to confirm this. He’s also known as one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. He’s a polarizing figure because of his controversial views on religion, and he is perhaps best known for that.

I’ve always been aware of Sam Harris. I’ve listened to a few of his podcasts, but beyond that, I haven’t engaged with his work. I don’t know enough about the man or his work to have a strong opinion, but he seems earnest to me. I reserve the right to change my mind. I know several people whom I look up to who strongly dislike the man. Nevertheless, on this podcast, Sam spoke about several topics that interest me, such as social media, polarization, misinformation, meditation, and self-discovery, so I decided to listen to it.

On social media

Discussing the ills of social media and how it’s destroying society has become a tired cliché, and it’s something I’ve been guilty of as well. It’s not that I don’t think social media has its benefits; it does. Once you figure out how to use it productively-ish, it’s like having some of the smartest people on the planet at your fingertips. Many new things I learn are because of Twitter.

The trick to remaining sane and unscarred on social media is to avoid talking about politics, religion, and other sensitive topics. Discussing complicated subjects like religion and politics on Twitter is akin to trying to debate the meaning of life in the comments section of Pornhub. That’s not what these platforms are meant for.

Now, a reasonable person, armed with reams of studies, might argue that the moral panic over social media is overdone. The same reasonable person might try to persuade you with p-values, regressions, and randomized controlled trials (RCTs). If I were on the receiving end of such a statistical sermon, I would respond with Ben Recht’s marvelous take on sensible views vs. sensible views backed only by studies:

The problem is that scientific elites don’t know better. Our capabilities to know and understand human behavior using the scientific method have been demonstrated so deeply fallible that I don’t even know where to begin. And yet policymakers cite these papers in their briefs, experts get quoted in court documents, and we race to the bottom to find “evidence” that justifies whatever position we want. This leads to, as Tyler says, gaslighting. Anyone with working eyes sees one thing, but you can find any random scientist to cook a study to claim “the evidence” points the other way. Again, we shouldn’t be pointing to an uninterpretable mess as evidence for anything. If those techniques are failing us, why should we outsource decisions to The Science? Especially when answers are staring us in the face.

Having said that, I’m unsure if, on balance, social media is a net positive for humanity.

Twitter and LinkedIn are the only two platforms I spend time on. I rarely post and often use these platforms as aggregators to curate opinions on topics that interest me. LinkedIn is a peculiar platform rife with what I call banal bullshit. It’s as if people are trying to show that they can evolve back to being apes. The platform is a giant completion for saying the most parody-worthy stuff. In limited doses, it’s entertaining.

Twitter, on the other hand, is what you’d get if a toxic sewer and a public toilet wall had a baby. It feels like the platform is becoming more toxic and unhinged by the day. While you can still, with some effort, use it productively without losing a part of your soul, it’s becoming increasingly difficult. It seems the current platform owner wants to mess with all of humanity just for kicks. As social media users, we are pawns in a game, and we keep forgetting this fact.

Status-anxious people who feel marginalized in relatively rich countries, like the US, are more likely to engage with politics as a kind of game: feel empowered by sowing chaos. — Derek Thompson

I liked Sam’s take on it. It’s not that social media is the root cause of all that’s wrong with the world, but it has played a part.

Sam Harris: I’m quite worried that we have performed a psychological experiment on ourselves that’s not going well. And I credit social media with a lot of the problem, but it’s not everything. I was just reading “The Closing of the American Mind,” which came out in ’87, I think. And so much of what ails us was warned about in that book by Alan Bloom. Many of these trends have been advancing on us for many decades.

I’m paraphrasing, but someone once said that it’s crazy that we thought putting all of humanity in the same room and letting them scream at each other was going to end well.

New religion of contrarianism

Sam has a way with catchy phrases. In the conversation, he says that we are in a “choose your own epistemic adventure moment,” and I think that observation is on the money. Thanks to the internet and the epic explosion in content, people can find material that confirms whatever misguided or deranged ideas they have.

Connoisseurs of kooky and unhinged nonsense have never been more mainstream. This isn’t just a US problem, but an Indian one as well. A cursory search on YouTube reveals truly horrific content being peddled by individuals who might otherwise struggle to find employment at an Indian Oil fuel station.

It’s become fashionable to peddle contrarian views on hot-button topics just for the sake of it. Tragically, this is perceived as a sign of intelligence among certain people who are predisposed to believing conspiratorial ideas.

I started watching this video because the title of the video was intriguing. Although the topic of the conversation was too US-focused, one part of the conversation stood out for me. I think this observation is spot on:

There are all of these grievance entrepreneurs now, merchants of grievance, right, who they actually don’t want their complaint solved because what keeps them in business is the waging of that complaint. Right? They are exploiting and tilling anger for profit. Um, but the people who they’re whipping into these, into these frenzies don’t realize that. And it’s extraordinarily cynical and it’s extraordinarily corrosive. — Frank Bruni

Now, as easy as it is to label people who believe in conspiracy theories as stupid, I don’t think that’s always the case. As with most things in life, there’s nuance. I came across this passage in Celine Nguyen’s wonderful newsletter:

First, that conspiratorial thinking, and conspiratorial aesthetics, appear in both right-wing and left-wing art. It’s a pejorative term, Gogarty notes: by calling something a conspiracy theory, you are situating it as beneath serious consideration. That doesn’t mean we should rehabilitate all conspiracy theories—some are genuinely insidious, and easily weaponized against marginalized populations. But other conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously, since they reflect how power is subjectively experienced by people, and are useful for understanding all the anxieties, fears, insecurities, and traumas that the powerless experience.

I don’t know the scale of the problem, but it feels like we’re losing our ability to even agree on the most basic facts. The optimist in me likes to think that most of the world is sane and it’s just a small percentage of fringe voices on the internet, but with each passing month, I become less sure of this.

Rich Roll: All of the incentives out there in podcast-landia and on social media incentivize this type of behavior. What traffics is hypotheses that challenge the mainstream narrative, and no matter how unhinged these ideas are, that seems to be what people are interested in. And that comes at the cost of truth and this shared sense of what is real and what isn’t.

Sam Harris: Just asking questions, or…

Rich Roll: Yeah, yeah. “I’m just asking questions. I’m here for open and free dialogue.” And everything that you’re seeing and reading in mainstream news outlets is corrupted and co-opted and captured. And yet there is no journalistic ethic at play in podcast-landia or in, you know, social media at large. So when somebody is platforming an individual with specious ideas and allows them to basically just pontificate ad nauseam without any pushback…

I think there’s something deeply cynical about him as a person (Tucker Carslon). I don’t know him, I’ve been interviewed by him a couple times but it was a long time ago. I met him a couple times, but I want to just see how he operates. It’s, um, there’s no question he’s pandering consciously to an audience. You know, he just knows how he’s going to, how his brand is built. But what’s amazing is the audience is such that there’s no level of incoherence, both with you know, with just the facts as we know them about evolution or about anything else, or even incoherence with one’s own self, right, that matters.

And someone like Trump can contradict himself in the span of five minutes, and he has an audience that doesn’t care. Which I don’t know what to compare it to. It’s almost like the, you know, is the World Wrestling Federation audience. It’s like they on some level know the thing is fake, but you’ve agreed to take it seriously. It’s, you know, ironically, it’s dangerous but for different reasons than it seems to be dangerous. I mean, I’m not saying those guys aren’t real athletes, and but it’s just, it’s all about a kind of performance that creates a certain mood, you know.

And in this case, in the contrarian space, it’s a mood of suspicion. It’s a mood of contempt for so-called elites and for institutions. You know, the conspiracy thinking issue is, you know, I view it as a kind of pornography of doubt. You know, it’s a pornography of mistrust. It’s just the people at Davos are just twirling their mustaches and pulling, you know, the strings. And the World Economic Forum, on some level it all comes back to the Jews for half of these people. You know, there’s a danger to this kind of thinking.

Ultimately, before you arrive at pogroms or, you know, genocides, there are many steps along the way where you have a, even a very wealthy democracy like our own, becoming less and less able to govern itself. I think they mean, we, we made terrific missteps during COVID obviously, but we should have learned something from them and we should be better placed to respond to the next pandemic. I think that if we had another pandemic today, we would do worse.

Again, I don’t know the scale of the problem, but our inability to agree on a shared reality is wreaking havoc on trust. There’s an air of deep-rooted cynicism and mistrust. Thanks to relentless attacks by loudmouths, trust in key institutions has never been lower. Fringe voices peddling dangerous nonsense are now filling this void.

I will concede that the moral panic over misinformation and disinformation could be overblown. There’s a growing body of research on the extent of the misinformation problem, and I intend to write about it in the coming months.

Sam Harris: And what is real. Yeah, and the problem, especially right of center at the moment, is that any effort to contain the misinformation problem is perceived as censorship. Right? So whether it’s a platform, you know, trying to get aggressive with moderation, whether it’s a government that’s worrying about the malicious amplification of disinformation and misinformation, whether it’s just the acknowledgement that the algorithms are such that they preferentially amplify misinformation, there’s something wrong with that.

Right? It’s not actually there, just a level playing field upon which everyone has their free speech. No, there’s just a business model that is just bursting to the seams with perverse incentives, and we know that lies are traveling faster and farther than the truth.

Any effort to address that, even what I’m saying now, even just acknowledging the misinformation problem itself, makes you sound like an elitist stooge anywhere right of center in America in particular. Right? So it’s a pro-censorship elitist stooge. And you know, the space we’re in, alternative media, really plays into this because there’s just this, you know, what I’ve been calling a new religion of contrarianism, where every anti-establishment narrative just gets endlessly extrapolated.

And it doesn’t matter if they don’t all fit together. Right? It’s just, what you want is just this rapacious search for anomalies. They don’t have to all fit together. It just can be like, you know, the wall with strings connecting nodes of madness, you know, John Nash style.

And so you have a figure like Tucker Carlson who really gets lionized throughout the podcastsphere. I’ve just, I’ve watched podcast after podcast have him on, you know, since he got kicked off of Fox, and not ask him a skeptical question. Whereas he’s a demonstrated liar and demagogue. And it really, I could just think he’s an entertainer, you know. He’s a very cynical entertainer, really. You know, and he’s entertaining a personality cult that is organized around Trump and other figures out in, you know, out on the populist right in America.

But it’s not to say that nothing he says is ever true, but many of these people have cultivated audiences that simply don’t care about lies. Right? This is the thing that’s amazing. This, like, there are people who are uncancelable because they have found an audience that simply doesn’t care about any normal indiscretion that would cancel somebody. Right? Like, you know, we can talk about cancel culture. It’s a real problem.

It’s not, you know, I’m not ignoring all of the craziness on the left that has gotten people, you know, fired and, you know, reputationally murdered. But, you know, when you’re talking about someone like Trump or Tucker or any of these, you know, populist figures on the right, the people who love them, the people who support them, don’t care when they are caught lying. Right? That doesn’t matter. That’s just how you play the game. And that’s, you know, so it’s, they’re playing by a different kind of reputational physics, and it’s totally dysfunctional for our politics.

All of this reminds me of something the brilliant Ricky Gervais once said:

There’s this new thing of “winning is more important than being right.” Right? And it started and it started with social media, it started with political correctness where people now believe that they quite rightly believe their opinion is worth as much as someone else’s opinion. But even if your opinion is worth as much similar this opinion, people now think their opinion is worth as much as other people’s facts.

It’s the world gone crazy that the alternative facts. What? We used to call them lies.

Chosen suffering

There’s a big chunk of the podcast where Sam talks about his experiences with psychedelics and mediation. As I heard him speak, this part struck me because I recently started experimenting with meditation because of my debilitating sleep issues. Just last week, I started reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and he writes something similar in the book.

Virtually all of our suffering is a matter of our entanglement with thought and not noticing that machinery and not seeing an alternative. Right? So we’re just, we’re continually defining ourselves and losing our purchase on the present moment and desiring and fearing and regretting and manufacturing disappointments and animosities and defending an empty core of experience that doesn’t need to be defended. Right?

Like we, there’s a hallucinatory aspect to our thinking, or even very normal thinking, that is quite analogous to being asleep and dreaming and just not noticing that you’re dreaming. Like, and most of us are having a bad dream most of the time.

And so what happens on psychedelics, for you know, again when things go well – you know, things can go very badly – is you can have a very clear experience of waking up from the dream of self. This sense that the deepest gratification of one’s desire is to be seeking something, to be seeking happiness in the next moment, to be seeking to arrive in the future. It’s the experience of a full arrival in the present, right, which very few people tend to have.

I mean, even when you’re, even when things are going great and you’re getting what you want, there’s always this superficiality. Again, it comes down to our incapacity to really pay attention and really make contact with experience. There’s just, you’re just skating across the top of experience and grabbing more, more, more.

You know, whether it’s a meal or it’s getting a massage or whatever, whatever the pure pleasure experience is, there’s a way which you’re not really dropped back into the present. You’re leaning forward and you’re just trying to extract this next moment of pleasure. And then also your mind is wandering to the next thing you’re going to do.

It’s just the mirage-like quality of even the best experiences is so amazing to notice because you never quite get there. It begins to fall apart. Your mouth is full of the thing that you’ve been waiting to eat, and it’s, and it’s, you still can’t quite arrive. And in the next instant you need a drink of water to offset the thing that is just too cloying and it’s just too much and you’ve, and now you’re, now you’re uncomfortably stuffed and you’re like, like there’s always a problem.

Our inability to enjoy the present and our tendency to keep bouncing between the past and the future is at the root of all our suffering. It’s easy to write this, but it’s a hard habit to get rid of. Once you start meditating, this destructive tendency becomes clear, and the clarity with which you notice it is enhanced.

The skill of consuming Information

Not letting it consume you

Postscript

There’s a lengthy discussion about religion, and Sam expresses some provocative and what might seem like incendiary views. It’s for this reason that he’s been accused of being a racist and an Islamophobe. As someone indifferent to religion, I don’t have strong opinions on Sam’s position. However, if you are religious, you may find his views offensive. If you want to avoid being triggered, you might want to steer clear.

But if you have an open mind, I’d recommend engaging with his work, even if you vehemently disagree with everything he says. The ability to engage with people you don’t like and have thoughtful and respectful disagreements is an important life skill.

Additional listening

The good folks of the Decoding the Gurus podcast had published an episode on Sam. In case you don’t know, the podcast takes a critical look at the claims made by popular gurus of our time.

First, that conspiratorial thinking, and conspiratorial aesthetics, appear in both right-wing and left-wing art. It’s a pejorative term, Gogarty notes: by calling something a conspiracy theory, you are situating it as beneath serious consideration. That doesn’t mean we should rehabilitate all conspiracy theories—some are genuinely insidious, and easily weaponized against marginalized populations. But other conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously, since they reflect how power is subjectively experienced by people, and are useful for understanding all the anxieties, fears, insecurities, and traumas that the powerless experience.

I don’t know the scale of the problem, but it feels like we’re losing our ability to even agree on the most basic facts. The optimist in me likes to think that most of the world is sane and it’s just a small percentage of fringe voices on the internet, but with each passing month, I become less sure of this.

Rich Roll: All of the incentives out there in podcast-landia and on social media incentivize this type of behavior. What traffics is hypotheses that challenge the mainstream narrative, and no matter how unhinged these ideas are, that seems to be what people are interested in. And that comes at the cost of truth and this shared sense of what is real and what isn’t.

Sam Harris: Just asking questions, or…

Rich Roll: Yeah, yeah. “I’m just asking questions. I’m here for open and free dialogue.” And everything that you’re seeing and reading in mainstream news outlets is corrupted and co-opted and captured. And yet there is no journalistic ethic at play in podcast-landia or in, you know, social media at large. So when somebody is platforming an individual with specious ideas and allows them to basically just pontificate ad nauseam without any pushback…

I think there’s something deeply cynical about him as a person (Tucker Carslon). I don’t know him, I’ve been interviewed by him a couple times but it was a long time ago. I met him a couple times, but I want to just see how he operates. It’s, um, there’s no question he’s pandering consciously to an audience. You know, he just knows how he’s going to, how his brand is built. But what’s amazing is the audience is such that there’s no level of incoherence, both with you know, with just the facts as we know them about evolution or about anything else, or even incoherence with one’s own self, right, that matters.

And someone like Trump can contradict himself in the span of five minutes, and he has an audience that doesn’t care. Which I don’t know what to compare it to. It’s almost like the, you know, is the World Wrestling Federation audience. It’s like they on some level know the thing is fake, but you’ve agreed to take it seriously. It’s, you know, ironically, it’s dangerous but for different reasons than it seems to be dangerous. I mean, I’m not saying those guys aren’t real athletes, and but it’s just, it’s all about a kind of performance that creates a certain mood, you know.

And in this case, in the contrarian space, it’s a mood of suspicion. It’s a mood of contempt for so-called elites and for institutions. You know, the conspiracy thinking issue is, you know, I view it as a kind of pornography of doubt. You know, it’s a pornography of mistrust. It’s just the people at Davos are just twirling their mustaches and pulling, you know, the strings. And the World Economic Forum, on some level it all comes back to the Jews for half of these people. You know, there’s a danger to this kind of thinking.

Ultimately, before you arrive at pogroms or, you know, genocides, there are many steps along the way where you have a, even a very wealthy democracy like our own, becoming less and less able to govern itself. I think they mean, we, we made terrific missteps during COVID obviously, but we should have learned something from them and we should be better placed to respond to the next pandemic. I think that if we had another pandemic today, we would do worse.

Again, I don’t know the scale of the problem, but our inability to agree on a shared reality is wreaking havoc on trust. There’s an air of deep-rooted cynicism and mistrust. Thanks to relentless attacks by loudmouths, trust in key institutions has never been lower. Fringe voices peddling dangerous nonsense are now filling this void.

I will concede that the moral panic over misinformation and disinformation could be overblown. There’s a growing body of research on the extent of the misinformation problem, and I intend to write about it in the coming months.

Sam Harris: And what is real. Yeah, and the problem, especially right of center at the moment, is that any effort to contain the misinformation problem is perceived as censorship. Right? So whether it’s a platform, you know, trying to get aggressive with moderation, whether it’s a government that’s worrying about the malicious amplification of disinformation and misinformation, whether it’s just the acknowledgement that the algorithms are such that they preferentially amplify misinformation, there’s something wrong with that.

Right? It’s not actually there, just a level playing field upon which everyone has their free speech. No, there’s just a business model that is just bursting to the seams with perverse incentives, and we know that lies are traveling faster and farther than the truth.

Any effort to address that, even what I’m saying now, even just acknowledging the misinformation problem itself, makes you sound like an elitist stooge anywhere right of center in America in particular. Right? So it’s a pro-censorship elitist stooge. And you know, the space we’re in, alternative media, really plays into this because there’s just this, you know, what I’ve been calling a new religion of contrarianism, where every anti-establishment narrative just gets endlessly extrapolated.

And it doesn’t matter if they don’t all fit together. Right? It’s just, what you want is just this rapacious search for anomalies. They don’t have to all fit together. It just can be like, you know, the wall with strings connecting nodes of madness, you know, John Nash style.

And so you have a figure like Tucker Carlson who really gets lionized throughout the podcastsphere. I’ve just, I’ve watched podcast after podcast have him on, you know, since he got kicked off of Fox, and not ask him a skeptical question. Whereas he’s a demonstrated liar and demagogue. And it really, I could just think he’s an entertainer, you know. He’s a very cynical entertainer, really. You know, and he’s entertaining a personality cult that is organized around Trump and other figures out in, you know, out on the populist right in America.

But it’s not to say that nothing he says is ever true, but many of these people have cultivated audiences that simply don’t care about lies. Right? This is the thing that’s amazing. This, like, there are people who are uncancelable because they have found an audience that simply doesn’t care about any normal indiscretion that would cancel somebody. Right? Like, you know, we can talk about cancel culture. It’s a real problem.

It’s not, you know, I’m not ignoring all of the craziness on the left that has gotten people, you know, fired and, you know, reputationally murdered. But, you know, when you’re talking about someone like Trump or Tucker or any of these, you know, populist figures on the right, the people who love them, the people who support them, don’t care when they are caught lying. Right? That doesn’t matter. That’s just how you play the game. And that’s, you know, so it’s, they’re playing by a different kind of reputational physics, and it’s totally dysfunctional for our politics.

All of this reminds me of something the brilliant Ricky Gervais once said:

There’s this new thing of “winning is more important than being right.” Right? And it started and it started with social media, it started with political correctness where people now believe that they quite rightly believe their opinion is worth as much as someone else’s opinion. But even if your opinion is worth as much similar this opinion, people now think their opinion is worth as much as other people’s facts.

It’s the world gone crazy that the alternative facts. What? We used to call them lies.

Chosen suffering

There’s a big chunk of the podcast where Sam talks about his experiences with psychedelics and mediation. As I heard him speak, this part struck me because I recently started experimenting with meditation because of my debilitating sleep issues. Just last week, I started reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and he writes something similar in the book.

Virtually all of our suffering is a matter of our entanglement with thought and not noticing that machinery and not seeing an alternative. Right? So we’re just, we’re continually defining ourselves and losing our purchase on the present moment and desiring and fearing and regretting and manufacturing disappointments and animosities and defending an empty core of experience that doesn’t need to be defended. Right?

Like we, there’s a hallucinatory aspect to our thinking, or even very normal thinking, that is quite analogous to being asleep and dreaming and just not noticing that you’re dreaming. Like, and most of us are having a bad dream most of the time.

And so what happens on psychedelics, for you know, again when things go well – you know, things can go very badly – is you can have a very clear experience of waking up from the dream of self. This sense that the deepest gratification of one’s desire is to be seeking something, to be seeking happiness in the next moment, to be seeking to arrive in the future. It’s the experience of a full arrival in the present, right, which very few people tend to have.

I mean, even when you’re, even when things are going great and you’re getting what you want, there’s always this superficiality. Again, it comes down to our incapacity to really pay attention and really make contact with experience. There’s just, you’re just skating across the top of experience and grabbing more, more, more.

You know, whether it’s a meal or it’s getting a massage or whatever, whatever the pure pleasure experience is, there’s a way which you’re not really dropped back into the present. You’re leaning forward and you’re just trying to extract this next moment of pleasure. And then also your mind is wandering to the next thing you’re going to do.

It’s just the mirage-like quality of even the best experiences is so amazing to notice because you never quite get there. It begins to fall apart. Your mouth is full of the thing that you’ve been waiting to eat, and it’s, and it’s, you still can’t quite arrive. And in the next instant you need a drink of water to offset the thing that is just too cloying and it’s just too much and you’ve, and now you’re, now you’re uncomfortably stuffed and you’re like, like there’s always a problem.

Our inability to enjoy the present and our tendency to keep bouncing between the past and the future is at the root of all our suffering. It’s easy to write this, but it’s a hard habit to get rid of. Once you start meditating, this destructive tendency becomes clear, and the clarity with which you notice it is enhanced.

The skill of consuming Information

Not letting it consume you

Postscript

There’s a lengthy discussion about religion, and Sam expresses some provocative and what might seem like incendiary views. It’s for this reason that he’s been accused of being a racist and an Islamophobe. As someone indifferent to religion, I don’t have strong opinions on Sam’s position. However, if you are religious, you may find his views offensive. If you want to avoid being triggered, you might want to steer clear.

But if you have an open mind, I’d recommend engaging with his work, even if you vehemently disagree with everything he says. The ability to engage with people you don’t like and have thoughtful and respectful disagreements is an important life skill.

Additional listening

The good folks of the Decoding the Gurus podcast had published an episode on Sam. In case you don’t know, the podcast takes a critical look at the claims made by popular gurus of our time.

In response, Sam agreed to appear on the show to address some of the criticisms, which I thought was admirable. I’ve just started listening to these episodes.