36 Comments

I so appreciate your courage and look forward to every one of your posts. I just became a paid subscriber. I used to comfortably for into the progressive label, but no longer. Thank you for creating thoughtful content for those of us in the middle!

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More tremendous food for thought. Although there are many similarities in recent socio-political developments in Canada and the US, there are obviously differences as well. One especially frightening difference is that, in Canada, the intellectually dead, or at least intellectually corrupt, progressives are actually in power. Between the Liberals and the NDP, they are supported by the majority of Canadian voters. Terrifying.

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The Michael Lind piece is excellent. As I told him, "progressive intellectual life" has become an oxymoron. I think the same applies on the extreme right. And unfortunately, social media amplifies. In that regard, Haidt's valuable contribution should be followed up by a more in depth read by the excellent Johann Hari. His latest book, "Stolen Focus: Why you can't pay attention", illustrates the way in which social media, indeed much of what passes for discourse in the Big Tech world are negatively and chronically affecting our brains and behavior and mitigating our ability to pay attention. Much along the same lines that you're discussing in your excellent piece today, Tara.

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As one of the exhaust majority...I thank you for all you are doing and look forward to all of your posts. Keep shining a light! More and more are waking up to the truth of how our society has been co-opted by the cult of woke via their cultural and colour revolutions that are playing out here in the West. We must collectively take a stand or we will become a communist country. This is how it began in China in 1966. People need to read history. Future proves past.

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I just finished the article. Whew… Haidt was on a stream of conscientious rant. I love Haidt, but the article disappointed me. While I agree with much of it… “Hey Zuckerberg… you and your Silicone Valley CEO peers said you wanted to change the world… you did… and not for the better.”… Haidt leaves out a couple of very key points.

First, trust had been eroding in the mainstream media for years before Facebook. Many well respected studies provide left and liberal bias was rampant and growing. Second, Haidt leaves out the corporatism problem… where political and business power is colluding for a shared goal of more power and money. The same billionaires that own the mainstream media own big tech… and they are supported by Wall Street… and they are connected to the American political establishment. They are active nihilists in their Great Reset globalist project that requires effectively breaking the American middle class that would otherwise rise up and stop it.

We have bigger problems than just social media, and they have been building for some time. And Haidt of course had to write the Atlantic article with a more liberal (anti-Trump and right-wing) slant; but 90% of our ideological turmoil is powered by the educated Democrat up and down that left-side ideological spectrum. It wasn’t Republicans that told people they were killers for not getting the novel mRNA vax. It wasn’t Republicans that demanded that children be kept out of school, masked and socially isolated for almost 2 years. It wasn’t Republicans that launched a “We will resist” tantrum of many. It wasn’t Republicans that launched the occupy movement, or BLM or Antifa from social media technology. There are kooks on the right side of politics, but I absolutely see that the left-side majority has adopted significant extreme absurdity and uses BOTH the mainstream media and social networking to organize and weaponize it as moral wedge issues specifically to destroy anyone that does not drink the Kool Aide.

How we solve THIS problem will take more than getting Zuck to see the light.

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Another wonderful and insightful post. Thank you so much Tara. It's like you're tapped into my subconscious and can articulate feelings I have based on observations but I can't quite specify myself. Then you bring receipts. I'm so happy you escaped CBC.

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The libraries piece was excellent, truly thought provoking. Thanks for bringing that to our attention. Haidt's piece, on the other hand, is truly awful and disappointing. I used to like him, but he's a lost libtard now. The article is riddled with his own New Atheist slanted views in a way that suggests an over-inflated ego trying to explain to the world why he's been unable to anticipate or help steer us toward solutions. At the end of the day, he's what he refers to as a WEIRD (as he explains in The Righteous Mind: Western Educated Industrial Rich & Democratic). And he's always been horrible with metaphor. The Babel analogy is completely useless. Unless I've missed something, I don't see how that metaphor helps us untangle or resolve anything. His hammering away at loss of trust in institutions is startling. Since when is that new? That was the legacy of the 1960s at the very latest (and probably traceable to further back than that). If anything, our society is characterised by the reverse, a blind doing as you're told that emerges from WEIRD culture, in which the "I" should really stand for "Institutionalised." He makes it sound as though we ought to trust these institutions, and he misses how social media gave the fatal blow to the fourth estate. I'm not going to take the article apart completely: let's leave it at that. A very disappointing read.

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One of the problems we on the "moderate" left face - especially if we care about thinking for ourselves and not ignoring facts - is how often we have to push back against the digital-entertainment-corporate Wokeocracy who also claim to be on the "left". For instance, indentity politics, notably in the US, have revived concepts I would have thought to have died long ago, e.g. racial essentialism and segregation. It's also somewhat disconcerting that people who declare themselves to be conservatives are, factually speaking, far more likely to defend freedom of expression than the New New Left (the original New Left were the 60s radicals). I used to read Fromm and Marcuse, now I read Douglas Murray.

The Hidden Tribes report is bang on - it acknowledges that a big chunk of people either don't care about politics (I've met people like this), or are moderate liberals or conservatives. It's one big mistake is to think that there are only two political ideologies in the West, liberal and conservative. I've written about this on Medium - I think that there are ten living political ideologies, combined in various ways by various people. It's an absolute mistake to argue that members of the DSA in the US, for instance, are "liberals" - where's the liberty they're defending? There are real socialists there, real anarcho-communists (Antifa), and a handful of real fascists. But the vast majority of Americans are none of these things.

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As evidence of the disconnect between truth and propaganda, I personally struggle to remain convinced the woke crowd are a small minority. So effective is their campaign to monopolize the political narrative, I often feel like a lone voice for rationality. That's why hearing from people such as Tara Henley, Bari Weis Jorden Petersen and those of the Hoover Institute is so important. I don't feel so isolated.

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I enjoyed that read, Tara, and the pieces it pointed to.

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It all makes so much sense! Thank you for this insight! Amazing the impact of social media on the individual mind! I worked as a pharmacy technician for over 12 years and the amount of anti depressants/psychotics prescribed was crazy to me! Why are so many people depressed? We've eliminated the need for actual social contact. Or so we think. It's more vital than we realize!

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Having spent my life in the legacy media (long before it was called that...then it was just "the papers"), let me assure the reader that journalists live inside a bubble and have nothing but utter contempt for the Bozos who read their stuff.

Pre social media, there was no way to judge the performance of any single component of a newspaper, which was great insulation for reporters to write about what THEY wanted to write about--thus the "take your medicine" folly of legacy journos. There were gross circulation numbers--but these were highly suspect and easily manipulated. So, no one had any actual metric about what was being written.

Now, even the NYT grandees know how many clicks a story gets and how "sticky" it might be. Culling low-clicks content is the result--there's no business reason not to pander to people who want to read what they believe and find reinforcement for their moral-political views.

The only social media company that had figured out how to play both sides of the street was Twitter--which has committed suicide by getting half their audience POd. Musk seems to be the only person who understands this.

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"They can keep trying. They will continue to fail. The majority may be exhausted, but it’s still the majority." This felt like a much-needed rallying cry as I read it (exhausted) after the holiday weekend. Almost no one I talk to IRL says the same kinds of things that go 'viral' on social media. Haidt's analogy of giving loaded weapons to 4-year-olds is apt, in that when I read a particularly mind-boggling perspective to extreme right or left, it often makes sense if you imagine a scared or angry child who is unable to self-regulate saying it. Part of the way to counter such nonsense is to build the places for mature relating that we want to see in the world. On that theme: thank you for Lean Out.

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Who bothers to read this sort of stuff? Sociology like psychology are on shaky ground with their claim to be sciences just like 'political science'. They belong with astrology which at least entertains and is not based on statistics. Note the success of recent polling. So, stick to reading tea leaves is my idea!

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I have been quite uneasy about the "increasing polarization" debate. I think that the two well-endowed extremes, although low in numbers (6% and 8%), tend to be overly active in social media, giving the mistaken impression of two huge blocks. I think the broad center, made up of agreeing and disagreeing (but not to the point of a chasm, but rather a discussion space of compromise) need to voice their concerns. I also think that the strident left is pusing people to the strident right. I am reminded of Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, to explain the rise of populism.

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