Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the program today.
Jonathan Haidt, who is an author, social psychologist and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.
He recently wrote an article for The Atlantic called Why the Past ten Years of American
Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.
Jonathan, always great to talk to you.
Speaker 5: Thanks, David.
It's great to be back with you.
Speaker 1: So in the in the article, you talk about a number of different things.
You lead with the story of Babel as a sort of metaphor for what's happened in the United
States since the 20th, starting in the 20 tens and the sort of fractured nature of the
country.
You talk about social media, you talk about political discourse.
You've talked about the impact of Trumpism, sort of on discourse and society for people
who maybe have not yet read the article and will link to it, and everybody should.
Can you give us sort of a flowchart, directional flowchart of the phenomena you observe?
Speaker 5: Sure.
Yes.
Thank you for that for that.
That's a good setup because we think in narrative, we think in stories, things make sense.
What we're going through now is so hard to understand, but if we tell the story, it goes
like this.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall Falls.
We have this incredible period of optimism about democracy.
This is also the period of the early Internet.
We had this incredible period of optimism about technology for those who remember the
early Earth.
And it was this magical, incredible place.
We get into the early 2000.
Of course, we do have 911.
We do have things get a little darker.
But that decade, the early social media platforms, the optimism, Wikipedia, I mean, it was just
incredible what this technology was going to do for democracy.
I'd like to bring readers back now to the peak year of 2011, a year that starts with
the Arab Spring.
And we think what dictator can stand up to two people in power by Facebook and other
platforms?
Right.
That year ends with Occupy Wall Street.
We think the people in power.
So 2011, we really is the peak year of techno democratic optimism.
2012.
Barack Obama's reelected.
Gay marriage resolutions are passing all around the country.
So it looks like this direction to history is clearly one direction.
And it would be the direction that would be favored by by progressives.
And then everything goes to hell.
Beginning around 2014, a lot of weird stuff happens in 2014.
My argument in the essay is that tribalism is very old.
This left right dynamic is very old.
But something changed in the 20 tens that made us afraid of each other.
That made it very easy for people to intimidate each other, and at least to fragmentation
within the left, fragmentation within the right.
And the key metaphor.
If you go back to the Tower of Babel story in Genesis, it's a very short little story.
The key line is that when God is offended by humanity's hubris, he says, Let us go down
and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another.
And that's what's new.
The Break.
It's not just the cross party hatred that's been going on for a while.
We've had that before.
If this new thing of just everything breaking up, we can't understand each other.
Speaker 1: That piece reminds me, you know, oftentimes people will talk about Orwell's
1984.
But what you just mentioned about the confusion is really more reminiscent to me of Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, where it's a sort of, you could say, a fire hose of falsehood
or this inability to sort of discern what's real or what isn't.
Is that an apt analogy to what you're describing?
Speaker 5: You know, there are elements of both, right?
We all read, you know, for my generation, we all read those two works at the eighth
grade or whenever it was.
And that's the way the 20th century thought about things.
Either it's going to be, you know, dictators like Stalin and Hitler, or it's going to be
some like techno oppression.
But neither of those anticipated the decentralization revolution.
That is what's happening now has some echoes of, you know, the Stasi in East Germany.
And people are afraid to speak and people can rattle each other, but there's no dictator.
And so just as you know, I've been learning a little bit about cryptocurrencies and decentralized
finance.
We talked about Defi in the same way you might speak about De Tote, that is there going to
be decentralized totalitarianism without any totalitarian or any leader?
We can all be afraid of each other.
And that has effects that suppress discourse, suppress people dissenting on both sides.
But moderates in particular are afraid to speak up because on the right, you're going
to get death threats and be horrifically attacked.
On the left, you'll be called a racist or transphobe.
So social media makes it very easy for the passionate extremes to attack the moderates
and to attack leaders.
That I think has messed us all up since around 2014.
Speaker 1: How did Donald Trump sort of exploit these circumstances?
Speaker 5: Donald Trump, the diagnosis I hear from my friends who are clinical psychologist
is narcissistic personality disorder.
He everything's about him.
He is not an evil genius.
He is not manic.
And he's not like this like brilliant mannequin and behind the scenes manipulator.
He is what he is.
He is a narcissist with very little self-control.
And he just does what he does.
And it just so happens that the political world, the communications world went insane
around 2014 to allow someone like him to actually be out there tweeting.
And, you know, we have negative partizanship.
The more you attack the other side, the more people like you on your side.
So my argument is that Donald Trump didn't cause the collapse of the Tower of Babel.
He certainly made things worse.
He made everything worse, made the passions worse, made the norms worse.
I mean, I blame him for a lot, but had he never run, most of these things would still
have happened.
Not quite as intense, but they would still happen.
And he benefited because in the pre battle era before we were all fragmented.
People saying the things he said like that was automatic exclusion.
Like everybody would have shunned him know.
But but afterwards nothing makes sense anymore.
There is no overarching narrative.
It's babble all the way forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
One of the things that I think resonates with me in terms of understanding that period is
it seemed that it became much more acceptable to publicly say a lot of the things that before
some people understood I think this, but I probably shouldn't say it.
I shouldn't say it at work, I shouldn't say it on social media.
It was sort of normalized to some degree.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Well, that's right.
And there was such a thing as polite society.
There were some norms that were widely shared, maybe not on the far right and far left, but
there was a sort of a, you know, a general consensus of polite society.
And you could be outside.
You could quickly get yourself outside polite society.
Part of what I'm arguing is that is that there's always let's let let's see how much a voice
does do people have at each point on the spectrum?
And it's always the case that people who are angry and loud are going to have more voice
because they try harder.
So the middle has less and the extremes have more.
When social media comes in and I don't mean early social media, I mean only after we get
the like button, the retweet button that's 2009.
We get threaded comments in 2013 which encourages everyone to fight with everyone in the comment
section.
It's.
This new Hyper-V realized environment.
That's what changes things.
And when that happens now, the extremes get much more voiced and the middle 80% gets much
less.
Many of us, we just keep our heads down.
People are exhausted.
They don't want to speak up.
And we can't have a deliberative democracy when most people don't want to even join the
discussion.
And when the people in the discussion are incentivized, literally incentivized to be
assholes.
The more of an ask you are, the more you say things that are extreme, the more you will
be successful.
So the incentives are so antithetical to what we need in our deliberative democracy.
Speaker 1: You talked about the spectrum.
There's this book, Waves of Rancor, which I think might not even be in print anymore,
which talked about the early days of talk radio, how it was dominated by sort of conservative
ownership, as well as by church radio, low power church radio.
And that this was part of why the right started to dominate talk radio now.
One of the things I also think is a factor is that these some of these platforms are
better vessels for some right wing ideas.
So like, for example, if you think about taxes, the right wing idea of taxes are bad, maybe
they're theft, maybe they're slavery.
Let's just make them as low as possible.
It's super simple and concise, and it's great for talk radio.
The position on the left is not Let's make taxes as high as possible.
It's well, we need the right level of taxation to account for the social programs we write.
So it's already sort of like structurally a problem.
Is this to some degree also a factor, but maybe even more so when it comes to social
media, the number of characters that are allowed on Twitter and this type of thing.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
If you think about the conditions under which people can have a discussion when they disagree,
here's a really, really bad way to do it.
How about let's bring people together and have them be perhaps anonymous?
Let's bring people together.
Have no shared past, no shared future.
It's a temporary interaction.
Let's bring them together in a place in which you guarantee that there is no context.
Whatever you say will be taken out of context because there is no context, especially Twitter.
Twitter, of course, being the worst of all.
And let's do it.
Let's have this discussion take place in the middle of the Roman Coliseum so that the stands
or you're having a discussion with someone, but you're not really talking to the person.
You don't really care about the person.
The audience is thousands of people all around cheering for blood.
Some are on your side, some are on the other person's side.
Now, what are the odds that you can have a good discussion about?
What do you think the proper tax rate should be and what should we do about immigration?
You know, you cannot have a discussion.
So so your question started with talk radio, and that is a huge part of our polarization.
That's something I didn't I mentioned in The Atlantic article, I should have said spent
more time on talk radio, really does radicalize the right in the beginning of seventies, but
especially in the nineties.
Fox News and all the talk radio stars doesn't have a similar effect on the left.
But I think my sense is that while talk radio made the right radicalize in the nineties,
social media made the left radicalize in the mid 20 tens.
There's been a lot written from that Iglesias, Origen and others calling it the Great Awakening.
An intensification of wokeness is the word used by the right, but it really did change
the dynamics on the left.
There's always been and there still is in the Democratic Party, a healthy debate between
where the far left and the moderate left.
So in the party, that dynamic is still going on, whereas in the Republican Party there
is none.
All the moderates are dead or expelled.
So the Republican Party, I say in the paper, the Republican Party has become the stupid
party.
You become stupid when you shoot your moderates.
If you don't have dissent, if you have orthodoxy, you become stupid.
You'll be wrong on most things.
The Republican Party is the stupid party.
The Democrats are not.
But my argument is that if you look at many of our epistemic institutions, that is those
that generate knowledge universities, media, the arts, journalism.
These, of course, are dominated by progressives.
That's always been the case, and it's very much the case now when those places like The
New York Times, when people can't dissent within a progressive organization, then that
organization becomes structurally stupid.
And so I think social media has intensified the power of progressive activists in a way
that has often suppressed dissent on the left.
And I think that actually, in the long run, I think that hurts the left.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we talked before the start of the interview about how there is an asymmetry
in how the extremes on either side are sort of impacted by the status quo.
I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that, but I also think it's important to mention
the extreme of the left, however we define it.
And I think sometimes what's called the extreme maybe isn't that extreme by global standards,
but let's put that aside for a moment.
It doesn't seem to have that much power in the Democratic Party, as evidenced by on Reddit
and Twitter in 2020.
It looked like Bernie was just running away with this thing and it wasn't even close in
terms of how Democratic voters actually voted in the primaries.
Speaker 5: That's right.
No, you're right.
It doesn't have that much power within the party.
And that's the asymmetry.
There's there's a great quote from John Stuart Mill that something like in all of the great
disputes about social matters, each side has been right in what it affirmed the wrong and
what it denied.
And when I talk to people on the left, they can I mean, the number of crimes committed
by the Republican Party, certainly from denying Barack Obama's Supreme Court appointment to
trying to storm the Capitol to overturn.
I mean, the crimes are it's unbelievable the crimes the Republican Party has committed.
And there is no comparison to what the Democrats have done.
So people who left are certain of that.
And they're right.
They're absolutely right.
Why don't those damn Republicans realize that?
Well, now talk to conservatives there.
You know, some will acknowledge that.
Yeah, you know, the party, you know, I'm not so comfortable with this, but and then, boy,
do they have a list of crimes of what the CBC did, what the media did, what the universities
did.
And they've got videos and they've got quotes and they're quotes from people that, you know.
So here's what I'm saying.
There's this giant asymmetry, and it's as in an argument between two spouses.
Each side, they've got their list of violations, the other, and they don't match up.
It's not we're not talking about the same thing.
So that's why, you know, look, I've always been on the left.
I was always trying to help the Democrats speak more intelligent about morality.
That's why I got into political psychology.
But when I wrote The Righteous Mind in 2011, I was writing at 2010 11, I began to get concerned,
like, Oh my God, actually, our country is coming apart.
I mean, the partizanship is becoming outrageous.
This is really dangerous.
And so I started focusing more on how do we fix our institutions, get our political game
working so that we can address these problems?
And now I'm in a state of complete panic because I think if you look at the trends we are so
far from, we're we're so far from even understanding not just the other side, but what our own
side is doing.
We are so confused.
We are basically lost in battle.
Speaker 1: Last thing I want to ask you about, and I know our time is not unlimited.
If we narrow down a little bit and think about if and how social media should be managed
or regulated based on your interpretation, every idea is out there from no regulation
whatsoever.
Just like allow everything and let it police itself to.
We need some kind of nonpartizan government board, but who decides who's on the board
and all of the problems that come with that?
What what where is your thinking on this?
At this?
Speaker 5: Well, so first so my thinking is first please stop talking about content, moderation.
And you framed it the way everyone does.
Is are we going to have more or less?
No, I don't want to talk about that, because the question is just, are we going to move
it up or down a little bit?
Elon Musk would have moved it down with less moderation.
No, that's not where the action.
Speaker 1: So what's the right question?
Speaker 5: But the right question is, what is this?
What is this technology, this platform that has changed our discourse?
What is the architecture?
What are the dynamics of this new platform after 2009 that has made it not?
We're never going to stop people from posting crazy nonsense.
But why is it that after 2009, the crazier the nonsense is, the further it goes?
What change and how can we change it?
And so there's two things.
The first thing to attend to is who who is on the platforms.
And here right now, any Russian agent can create a thousand accounts a day and run them
either personally or with bots, any jerk, any asshole.
And there are people who are trolls who have personality disorders.
They get to harass as many people as they want.
They get to make death threats.
Nothing happens.
Maybe they can't get shut down.
They can make a hundred more accounts.
The first thing is we must have user verification.
You can still post with a fake name, but to get an account with posting privileges, we
can't just let everyone make 1000 fake accounts.
That's insane.
So any large platform and Elon Musk even proposed this, at least partially, but I don't authenticate
user.
So that's one to pay attention to whether we whether you have to at least show you're
a person and old enough like that would cut down on a lot of it.
The second thing is the dynamics of amplification right now, the incentives are the nastier
you are, the further you go.
Let's try to reverse that.
So it would be very easy for Facebook or Twitter to quantify using AI and and human coders,
how aggressive is each person you get in aggression square?
All you do is say, you know, screw you, jerk with exclamation points, you get a five.
You're like, you know, overall, on average, you're a five on a 1 to 5 scale.
And what I'd like to see is when we start to open an account, your default is the filter
set to four.
So I will see only people who are four and below and the people who are five.
I don't see them, they don't see me.
I don't want them in my public square.
They don't belong in the public square.
I want to lower my filter to three or two.
I can do that if I want to see the assets, I can raise it to five.
If we did that, the incentive would not would be no longer be as much of an arsenal as you
can.
It would be, you know what, if you're a complete asshole, you're going to lose most of the
world.
They're not going to listen to you.
So that's the sort of change that'll be completely transformative.
Whereas the eternal argument about more or less content moderation of who decides and
where is the line that hasn't gone anywhere in 100 years?
It's never going to go anywhere.
Speaker 1: Absolutely fascinating idea.
As we've been speaking with Jonathan Hight, the article in The Atlantic is called Why
the Past ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.
Jonathan, always really appreciate your insights.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, David.
Let me just end by saying I've put all my resources on a single Web page.
If you go to Jonathan Hite dot com slash social media, I have everything you could want to
know about the effects of social media on teen mental health and on democracy.
Links to hundreds and hundreds of academic articles.
So that's a sort of a one stop shop where I show my work.