you opened the can of worms by stating that people now don't have differences of opinion about the facts they have different facts yes and the question is in part how is it under normal circumstances that people do see the same facts but then have different opinions it means there's a very deep consensus on top of which there's relatively trivial dispute that's a much better situation but part of the way that people do that is by using um well look look at it this way you have five senses each of which depend on a very different
physiological mechanism and that's because you can see things that aren't there and you can hear things that aren't there and you can touch things that aren't there but you can't see hear and touch things that aren't there so you use this multi-dimensional process of of uh of triangulating you actually use pentangulating i suppose with your five senses and you determine what's real but even that's not enough then what we do is we seek consensus we say okay well here's what the phenomenon appears to be to me what do you see and then if you see
it and someone else sees it and this would especially be good if we didn't share the same opinions but we could agree on what we saw then we think it's real now the technical problem is now no matter what you believe you can find a like-minded group that's discussing this avidly to to confirm your confirmation bias and what that means and i'm seeing this happening i can't believe how rapidly it's happening i'm seeing people degenerate into a conspiratorial paranoia and i'm seeing it in family members and in absolutely and in friends and like and as
well as manifesting itself in broader society and it's really i think we're driving ourselves insane with the net yes i i absolutely agree i'm very very worried about where we are and i'm in political terms i mean it's obviously deeper but in political terms i'm worried about it because i think the right is about to go off in america like the left in america has gone off well that was that was the likely outcome five years ago it looked to me like that was why i tried to i was concerned back in 2016 that things
were starting to degenerate and that the left would wake up the sleeping right you know the radicals on the far end of the spectrum who prefer action to words let's say by a large margin and who are truly dangerous i could see them being prodded into awakeness and it was a very frightening thing it still is a very frightening thing i mean one of the things i've thought about a lot in recent years about this is of course is is is is not just there's that possibility of the the two sides fighting it against each
other but but there ends up being no place to trust each other this is the and this seems to me in my conversations with people of different political types what i notice is that there is the most important thing if you're actually going to solve a problem and you know better than anyone how how much the political talk shall we say is actually not set up to solve problems it's set up for a performative thing it's set up for people to just play their part and read the script and and almost none of our political
discussion is actually problem solving oriented almost none of it but when you do when you do get close to solving a problem it exists and it exists the possibility only exists if the other person is is able to be trusted by you not to pull some funny stuff when you're not looking and i was thinking about this recently i was thinking about this reason i was in america and i was talking at one point with brett weinstein on his podcast and you know i completely bret is brett is from a very different political uh um
tradition from for me we have very different instincts on an awful lot of things um and a lot of very similar instincts but when i talk with brett about problems like uh i know we talked about poverty and homelessness and things i i completely trust him and he allows me to concede where i'm not willing often to concede because i'm i'm slightly worried that you know for instance let me give the obvious one i worry about the inequality discussion like a lot of people on the right not because i don't believe in equality exists but
i worry that the people who've been thinking about it most of the ones with the worst possible answer you know inequality that's another thing we should discuss because inequality is a terrible terrible problem it's a society devouring problem the only thing worse than inequality are the purported solutions frequently exactly so and it's it's it's it's perfect example of it because um every political side has a version of this you know what you the i think i think well we've talked about this a bit in the past i think one of the reasons that the right
finds it's so hard to persuade the left to talk about immigration for instance is the left just doesn't want to acknowledge it's it's the serious debate it is because it notices the right is the side that's been thinking about it most and it doesn't trust the answers the right has so it's it's it's definitely something that both sides have as an instinct so how do you solve a problem in this situation only by people from across the political divide trusting each other that that they that they don't have something funny they're going to pull when
you're not looking or to put another way they're not going to do something when you're beyond your own competency on the subject you're trying to solve so that that's how you actually solve a problem um now of course as i say we're not solving any problems at the moment and i noticed this i i said that the last couple of years is like the eye of sauron our society particularly whipped up by the wretched social media companies that make them rich have turned our societies into a great eye of sauron which scours across the land
and it looks at one thing dementedly and then it moves on to another thing and the problem about it is it doesn't solve a damn thing none of the things none of the things it focuses on you know it focuses on on um on on oh what did we have we had oh we had a green issue in january it was meant to be a climate emergency of january of last year every every democratic government was meant to announce a climate emergency then we had the covert emergency then we have the blm emergency you know
it's been emergency after emergency and we don't seem to solve them in fact we seem to we seem to make them worse when we address them because we can't agree on the thing that we're meant to be addressing so as i say if if if i was to try to try to come up with the things to solve this it would be that that people from the left and right who could trust each other but and just just one other thing on that the thing about that is the reason why i think we haven't been
able to do that particularly in america is this in my view the american left has an incorrect approximation of the proximity of fascism to the american political system you know or white nationalism to the center of the political system and obviously trump has given them a heck of a lot of ammunition but they were willing to use it anyway they've been using it for years they wanted to claim they basically that fascism was very very close now you see scenes like the reprehensible scenes at the capitol the other day and you see the ammunition that
these reprehensible people have just given the length to continue to pretend that the american right all of the right you know cnn presenters and others have said all of the right is now with the nazis with the fascists with the the white supremacists and if that's the case you can't if you're on the american left communicate with anyone on the american right because when you're not looking they're going to smuggle fascism in and get you all and the problem is that an element of the right look sometimes it's a reasonable critique distrusts the left because
it doesn't trust that it's social welfare instincts aren't going to be then subsumed into their socialist instincts aren't then going to be subsumed by a deep desire to have communism so so the right doesn't trust now i think there are elements of the right that have particularly in america deeply overstated the proximity of communism to the american political system just do you think i'm one of those no i don't no i don't why not well i think it's something i worry about you know when i'm looking at this positive feedback loop situation arise you know
i can't help but see similarities in the social identity movement and the marxist movement and i i mean you make that case in your book so maybe you're one of them too you know i i i don't know if this is a situation where you know the left purports to see fascism lurking behind every right-wing move and do you think the right is just as culpable with regards to seeing communism behind every left-wing move i mean i think it's complicated let me let me give you a statistic here a friend of mine just told me
the other day um you know there's only two self-described democratic socialists sitting in the in the congressional house in the united states on the democrat side there's only two the rest of them are moderates and most of the moderates are moderate moderates you know now those two attract a disproportionate amount of attention partly because they're incredibly savvy social media users whereas the moderates aren't at all and and and our technology are blind technologically in that sense but you know i guess i wonder how much conscience scouring everyone's asking themselves that i suppose now how much
conscience scouring is in order after the events on the hill last last week or two weeks ago
