A hand-written note from CH:
I wanted to tell you what a crazy kick-ass year we had – and to thank you. If I hadn’t met with you in late 2016, I doubt very much I would have ended up [here]. And studying your career & your various teachings was no small part of my success this past year…. It makes me think I could one day be just as useful to others as you have been to me.
I’ve watched 50+ interviews with doctors and scientists on COVID-19 and the lockdown. This doctor does the best job in explaining the facts in a way that anyone should be able to understand.
The End of Real Knowledge
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” – Leo Tolstoy
“When I take over the world the first thing I’m going to do is abolish social media,” I announced.
“Yeah, right,” my sister said.
“Not funny!” my niece shouted.
“You can abolish Facebook, but don’t touch my Twitter,” my daughter-in-law warned.
We were joking. Sort of.
It’s depressing. I think of us as a family of book readers, and yet we seem to be spending less and less time reading books. Other than novels, we seem to be doing more and more of our reading online. And the trend in online reading is for shorter and shorter bytes.
I’m all about checking for facts on Wikipedia. I’m happy to read essays and editorials online. And, yes, I spend a minute now and then following friends and family members on social media.
But I don’t fool myself into believing that sort of “reading” is enough.
It is not enough for serious research. It is not enough for gathering news. It is not enough for learning anything worth learning. And it is certainly not enough for discovering any understanding that resembles truth.
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously told us back in 1964. And right now, the internet wants messages that are short and sweet.
I was walking with one of my trainers this afternoon, after a tough, 90-minute workout. I try to walk at least a half-hour a day in the sun to refill my Vitamin D tank. We were talking about our favorite political pundits. We listen to most of the same people and so we are equally familiar with their insights and viewpoints. Worse, we know the same facts and data points that these pundits point out.
“Why are you always agreeing with me?” I said.
He knew I was kidding.
But that’s a real concern. When you use search engines and social media to shape your thoughts on topical issues, you are doing the most cursory sort of research. A thesis of 600 to 1,200 words can be persuasively supported by a single fact. And almost any thesis, however absurd, can be cogently argued in essay form. The limited length of the essay format makes that possible.
Neither of those things is true for writing books. Books are long. Instead of jotting down 600 to 1,200 words, the writer must put down a hundred times that many. As someone who’s written several thousand essays and 28 books, I can attest to the fact that it is much more difficult to defend an idea for 350 pages than it is in a page and a half.
The reason for that is that the issues worth writing books about are almost always complex. Complex ideas require complex logical arguments plus facts – lots of facts – to make them persuasive. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started writing a book based on an idea that worked beautifully in essay form, only to see it disintegrate as I got into it.)
If short essays are problematic in this way, so too are short communications of every kind. YouTube and other such digital media are replete with 4- to 6-minute video essays.
Twitter and its cousins feature opinions and statements that can be consumed in seconds, rather than minutes. The game here is to follow your favorite influencers’ briefest quips on some current topic, then read the comments from other followers and maybe post one of your own. This quickly degenerates into the digital equivalent of “playing the dozens,” a competition – engaged in mostly by black males on urban street corners – in which participants go head-to-head with their adversaries by slinging rhyming insults at one another.
At this point, the amount of real knowledge being conveyed is next to nothing.
For too many people these days, these hyper-short communications is the preferred way to get and offer ideas and opinions. And not just ideas and opinions, but also news.
It’s scary to think that people today feel that they get all the information they need to know about any current event through these media.
Not only are they content with such miniscule information, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the depth of knowledge they have and the strength of their views.
If all of this weren’t bad enough, this new fondness for superficial knowledge is aided and abetted by the algorithms these media employ. They have been formulated to make sure users have the enjoyment of seeing their preferences constantly reinforced. If you are on the political right, you will get right-wing news. If you are on the political left, you will get left-wing news.
Pick any hot topic (the coronavirus, the shutdown, the George Floyd killing, for example) and study the news you get compared to the news that someone with different views gets. You will be amazed.
The algorithms compound the true knowledge problem by shielding users from ideas (and even facts) that do not support their prejudices. Users are fed an endless stream of bits and pieces that make it virtually impossible for them to be aware of the complexity of any issue – and this is especially true for the most important issues of the day.
I am not the first essay writer to make this point. I considered writing on it before, but it never felt important to me. I must have had some kind of naïve faith in the intelligence of the individual.
But when I consider that topical conversations have become so void of good thinking, and how the new, briefer media is stimulating the deadly combination of weak ideas and strong feeling, it seems inevitable that we are moving quickly into an era where real knowledge is about as attractive to information consumers as a kale salad.
This essay and others are available for syndication.
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Why Truth May Be Less Important Than We Like to Think
In Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, James Clear wrote about truth from an evolutionary perspective. He pointed out that for our primate ancestors, understanding the truth of things (i.e., what sort of plants and animals are dangerous) was necessary for survival. But being part of the tribe was important too. And while these two fundamental survival needs “often work well together, they occasionally come into conflict.”
“In many circumstances,” Clear said,” social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth of a particular fact or idea.”
cursory (adjective)
Cursory (KER-suh-ree) describes something that is rapidly and often superficially performed or produced. As I used it today: “When you use search engines and social media to shape your thoughts on topical issues, you are doing the most cursory sort of research.”
“How to Change the World by Doing This One Thing Every Day” by James Altucher
A good thought piece. To read it, click here.
This short WSJ video reports on what some believe schools will be like in the future. I don’t believe it…
The End of Intimacy, Trust, and Love
“When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.” – Andy Warhol
I’ve been thinking about how the world has been coming apart lately.
Homo sapiens, as is often pointed out, are social creatures. We live in concentric social circles that extend outwards from the individual in degrees of love, trust, and intimacy.
At the center is the individual – i.e., YOU. Around you is a small circle of people you greatly love and deeply trust. This may include your spouse and immediate family and closest friends. But it may not. You know they are in your innermost circle because losing any one of them would be devastating to you. It would change your life forever. It would feel like losing a part of your heart. This is your Circle of Love.
Beyond them is a larger circle of people with whom you have good and comfortable relationships. You like them and they like you. You know how to enjoy each other’s company, and when you are together, you shift immediately into that familiar social mode. You may even say (and believe) that you love them. But you know – if you are honest with yourself – that you would not be devastated if they disappeared from your life. Still, you believe that you can trust them to help you if you need help. That matters to you. This group, too, can include family or friends. This is your Circle of Trust.
The third circle that surrounds you is your Circle of Acquaintanceship. It is comprised of people you interact with regularly but don’t know – or care – very much about. These are people from whom you might ask a favor and for whom you might do a favor, but only if it is not a terribly big one. And then it would depend on your mood.
Beyond that, there is a fourth circle: the billions of people you don’t know and that you care about only in the most abstract way. This is the Circle of the Others.
Those four circles have comprised man’s social universe for millennia. However, in the middle of the twentieth century, as we began to get most of our daily information from radio and television, a new circle appeared. This fifth circle was comprised of all the people we had never met personally but about whom we had strong feelings and opinions.
This fifth circle quickly pushed the fourth to the perimeter and then moved into third position. We began to trust the pundits we admired on radio and TV more than we trusted our neighbors. And we began to love our favorite TV personalities more than we loved our neighbors, too, even though we knew nothing about them but the characters they played.
Welcome to the Circle of Delusion… otherwise known as the Circle of Social Entropy…otherwise known as How We Put an End to Civilization.
Since the proliferation of social media, the Circle of Social Entropy has been nudging its way inwards towards the center of our social universe. It bypassed the Circle of the Others almost immediately and then the Circle of Acquaintanceship soon thereafter. Today, for millions, it has bypassed the Circle of Trust and is threatening to bypass even the Circle of Love. (An easy way to measure this is by seeing what’s been happening on Facebook the last few years. People are deleting “friends” over social and political issues.) In real life, friendships and families are disintegrating over social media posts.
In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argued that, by its nature, media has an effect on the ideas and sentiments that people form. He was right about that.
What social media has done in a very short time is astonishing. It has essentially allowed virtual relationships to move closer in our universe of intimacy than real ones. Increasingly, we have greater trust in the pundits, politicians, celebrities, and influencers we encounter daily through social media than we do in our neighbors, extended family, and friends.
I believe we are at the end of the way we have, for more than 100,000 years, developed relationships with other people. We are quickly moving into a world where love, and trust, and intimacy will be a largely digital experience.
What’s happening today is the end of real relationships. To me, that means an end to freedom and individuality.
And it gets worse. We are also on the threshold of The End of Real Knowledge. I’ll talk about that on Wednesday.
This essay and others are available for syndication.
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On Friday, I wrote an essay trying to make sense of the senseless killing of George Floyd. As part of that essay, I told three stories about my personal experience with racism and police brutality. One of those stories, in particular, generated a lot of feedback from readers, many of them wondering if there was more to it than what I was able to convey in that brief amount of space.
There is more to it. There’s actually a lot more that I remember about that incident…
I was sitting in a police station in Washington, DC, handcuffed to a chair…
I had been arrested because I had interfered with what I thought was a rape. The woman in the car was screaming “Rape!” It turned out the man she was accusing was a cop. So I got arrested for interfering with his arrest.
As I was sitting there waiting to be booked, three patrolmen brought in a middle-aged black man in handcuffs. The black man was well dressed and wore what looked like expensive glasses.
I don’t remember what he was charged with. I wasn’t paying that much attention. I was looking at the three other handcuffed men in the room, who, like me, were seated and waiting. Two were black. One seemed to be Latino. One of the black men was young, like 16 or 17. The other one was about five years older than me, in his early 40s. The Latino-looking guy looked to be in his 20s. They all looked scraggly, tough, and poor.
To me, they all looked GUILTY. But since I had been, in my mind, wrongly arrested, I wondered if they might have been wrongly arrested too. I felt a warming kinship to them. But I could see when they looked at me, a clean-cut white man in a suit and tie, that feeling of brotherhood was not reciprocated.
This little anagnorisis was interrupted by the stentorian voice of the desk sergeant. “I don’t like your tone of voice,” he admonished the middle-aged black man in front of him.
The black man stood there, silently but with his head up and the slightest trace of a smile on his lips. It was a posture of careful defiance.
The room was quiet now. The policemen that had been milling around in the background stopped talking.
The desk officer took the bait, beginning with a foray of small insults. I remember one – repeatedly calling the black man “four eyes” – because even back then it seemed so puerile to me. And thus a verbal fencing match began.
I don’t remember how long it lasted. It felt like half an hour. It was probably less than three minutes. But the battle wasn’t the least bit fair. From the start, the black man had the advantage.
In a crescendo of anger and frustration, the desk officer hurled increasingly juvenile insults at the black man, who remained calm, but was now responding, basically lecturing the cop as you might lecture your adolescent son about the advantages of keeping his temper.
I was, and still am, impressed by how stoically this handcuffed black man was standing up for himself at a moment when he was so clearly in danger. As a young man that disliked authority, I had many times found myself in situations similar to the one he was in now, and had learned from experience how well meekness works when confronted with an adversary with a handgun.
So I was at once astonished and awed by the courage of this man who, I realized, was much closer to me in terms of affluence and education than our three fellow detainees. But I was also afraid for him. I remember thinking: “Is this the first time he’s ever been arrested?”
Sure enough, moments later, the desk sergeant got up from his seat, came around from his desk, grabbed hold of this man that had just made a fool of him, and dragged him past me and down a corridor to the holding cells.
The only sound in the room was the shuffling of shoes as the three arresting officers followed their sergeant down the corridor and out of view – or so they must have thought. I had a clear view of the corridor and even a bit of the inside of the cell into which they pushed the black man.
The sergeant went into the cell. The three cops stood at the door watching as the enraged and humiliated loser of the debate beat the shit out of the victor.
The sergeant emerged from the cell and locked it. The other cops followed him back up the corridor. I noticed, for the first time, that one of them was black. I studied his face. It seemed troubled. But so did the other two faces. Maybe it was my imagination.
As the sergeant neared me, he realized that I had probably seen the entire obscene (literally, obscene… look it up) performance. He grinned at me, dust-clapping his hands as if to say, “Well, I guess I showed him.”
Since this show was directed at me, the drama had shifted and I was now an actor in it. This was act two and the audience was watching.
So I said – because I couldn’t stop myself from saying it – “You must be proud. You’re a real tough guy.”
He glared at me and I imagined the headline: Journalist Hangs Himself in Jail Cell. Then he lowered his eyes a bit… and walked past me.
anagnorisis (noun)
Anagnorisis (a-nag-NOR-ih-sis) is the point in a play, novel, etc. in which a principal character recognizes or discovers another character’s true identity or the true nature of their own circumstances. As I used it today: “This little anagnorisis was interrupted by the stentorian voice of the desk sergeant. ‘I don’t like your tone of voice,’ he admonished the middle-aged black man in front of him.”