The Community We Should All Live In

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"If you want peace, freedom and knowledge, there's only one way to get it. None of the other ways to organize politics or knowledge lead to that," he says. "You just have to whether you know the system that put that shot in my arm... You kind of have to decide if you value that right?" 'I love that phrase. It's the community we should all live in'

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.