The Spiral of Silence

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Michael Wolraich's new book is about the idea that it's not just a marketplace of ideas, it's a constitution of knowledge. He says there are tactics being used to undermine this impersonal process of social discovery and social learning. And one of those goes by a name that didn't even exist when i started writing the book, which is concil culture. A chilled in iroment where people are falsifying their preferences because one whole side is chilled and repressed ecause they don't want to get into this kind of social trouble.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.