The Single Most Counter Intuitive Social Idea of All Time

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Free speech is the single most counter intuitive social idea of all time. It's not how wer wired as humans really, stuff that is bigoted, wrong offensive, blasphemous, heretical and seditious should be protected by the government. The only justification for that completely bonkers idea is that it's also the single most successful social ideas of all time. By historic standards and international standards, we're doing incredibly well.

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.