Podcast #245: How We Form Our Political Beliefs with Oliver Traldi

Introduction: My guest today is the philosopher Oliver Traldi. Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University and an incoming professor at the Honors College of the University of Tulsa. I talked to Oliver about his recent book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction, published by Routledge University Press. Oliver has chosen to forgo royalty payments in exchange for permission to make his book freely available online.

Oliver and I discussed a number of philosophical questions with implications for everyone who is keenly interested in politics. What do we mean when we describe something as political? How do we form our political beliefs? Why do those views tend to cluster around certain anchoring beliefs? Is the marketplace of ideas a good metaphor for the way in which we arrive at political opinions? Why is politics so adversarial and is that a good thing? How does identity figure into this? And why should we take an interest in politics at all? I hope you enjoy Oliver’s thoughtful musings on these and other topics, amid a wide-ranging conversation.

Iona Italia: I’m going to start, Oliver, by reading a passage about your book. And then I think we should start by getting into the central question, which is, what makes a belief political? And what impact does the political nature of the belief have on how we come to believe it, whether we should believe it.

OK, I’m going to read a little bit from the introduction.

This book is about the reasons that people have, and could have, for political beliefs: the evidence they might draw on, the psychological sources of their views, and the question of how we ought to form our political beliefs if we want to be rational.

You’ve probably heard many people express their political beliefs. Maybe you’ve expressed some of your own. In particular, you’ve probably heard many people have political disagreements—disputes with each other, in words, over their political beliefs. Such disputes occur in debates, in dorm rooms, over the dinner table. They occur between competing candidates, between classmates, between comrades. Maybe you’re the instigator of such disagreements. Or maybe you join unwillingly, pulled in by the emotional force of the conversation or the certainty that someone else has said something incorrect or even evil. Or maybe you’re the one quietly asking: “Why did you have to make it all political?” Whichever role you play, this book is for you.

Social epistemology asks how we should form our beliefs, and how we should evaluate the ones we have, given that we live in a world with other people. Should we trust other people? What should we do when they disagree with us? Political epistemology, the topic of this book, is much like social epistemology applied to politics, but it also includes a few extra dimensions. First, we don’t just live in a world with other individuals; those individuals form groups, and we ourselves are likely members of certain kinds of groups as well. Just what it means for individuals to form a group is difficult to pin down, but many political theorists take the idea of a group to be part of the essence of politics. Second, political beliefs are often beliefs about what we ought to do, and those sorts of beliefs, what I’ll call moral beliefs or values, introduce their own epistemological puzzles. Third, to the extent that politics is a distinct field of inquiry, it may present challenges of its own, like complexity.

I’ll offer my own theory by the end of the third chapter. [We’ll get to that in a moment.] But like most theories in philosophy, it’s probably wrong. [I love that.] Occasionally people talk as though we can infer conclusions about what political actors ought to do from an analysis of politics. In particular, commentators who adhere to the slogan, ‘politics is about power’ will often say that this means that political actors ought to focus on accumulating and deploying political power, rather than thinking about what’s right or wrong, or trying not to fall afoul of political norms.

Actually, I think I’m going to stop there because that goes into a little bit too much of a detour from the central point. So, you said that you came up with your own theory about what it means for a belief to be political. So, tell me, how do you see that? What makes something political?

Oliver Traldi: Yeah, so first of all, I’d like to say somebody on Twitter recently suggested that I should have an audiobook version of the book, which I never thought of. Listening to you talk, I felt like you would probably be a great audiobook reader. I don’t know if you ever considered that line of work. But my words sounded much better in your voice than they do in my own head.

II: I’d love to!

OT: So, I have a theory of what makes beliefs political. It’s only half a theory because it relies on, it assumes we already know what it means for something to be political in general or what politics is, what political actions are. So, my theory has a few elements. Let me see if I can remember all of them. The first is that there’s a requirement that the belief be in some sort of controversy, right? So, for me, politics is, for the most part, about conflict and about disputes. Not every dispute is political, but pretty much all politics has some conflictual element or some elements of dispute to it. So, if everybody agrees about something, I’m probably not going to consider that belief political. So, disagreement is pretty essential to political beliefs for me.

So, my theory of political belief has two elements, one of which has some subparts. The first is that a belief has to be in dispute or in some sort of controversy to be political for me. If everybody agrees about something, I don’t consider that political because I take conflict to be part of the nature of politics, probably not the only thing that goes into something being political. It’s something I’m still thinking about, but a dispute is necessary. Something everybody agrees on won’t be political for me. And the other thing is that the belief has to be connected to politics in some way. So, to say this, we need to have a prior conception of what politics is, which I don’t give. I don’t give a final answer to the question of what is political.

But assuming we know an answer to that question, the belief has to be connected to it in one of two ways. One way that something can be connected to politics for me is that it can be a ground for political action, right? Say I think a certain candidate is corrupt, can’t be trusted, that’s a ground for me voting against them, right? So that’s connected to politics, it affects an action that I would take related to politics. Or if I think a bill would be really bad for the country if passed, that’s a ground for my political action of voting against it. Or if I vote in a legislature or protest it or trying to convince my friends to vote for people who wouldn’t vote for it and things like that. So, it’s support for some action, something that rationalises or justifies or explains actions relating to politics. That’s one way of being connected to politics. And the other way that I think a belief can be political is by being connected to the way that we divide up political groups. So, in that quote you read, I was already thinking a little about the fact that it seems to be part of politics that we’re divided into groups, that there are groups struggling for power. It’s not clear if individuals can do politics on their own without trying to form coalitions or represent constituencies and things like that.

Another way for me a belief can be connected to politics is by being the sort of belief that divides one group from another. If it’s just sufficiently correlated with the groups, everybody in one group believes one thing, everybody in the other group believes another, that for me suffices to be a political belief because it’s the sort of belief that’s involved in our political disputes.

So, those are the two kinds of political belief for me. This theory has already faced some challenges from some readers. The notion that a political belief has to be in controversy is, I think, what’s received the most challenge. Some people say, ‘Imagine everybody thinks the bill should be passed and we just haven’t passed it yet.’ To them, that might still be a political belief because it’s involved in the business of politics in the right way. And maybe they’re right. For me, for me it seems not, but one thing I liked about writing this book was I got my ideas out on the table and then I was able to say, ‘I’ll let other people take it from here for the most part,’ which is a really nice feeling to give up a little bit of power and responsibility.

II: Well, you did make that nice disclaimer that most theories in philosophy are wrong. That really covered your butt.

OT: Yeah, I’m a little risk averse in that way.

II: I can’t imagine a bill that absolutely everybody would believe must pass. So, for me, I think there’s still got to be some form of dispute. And the fact that something is agreed to by a majority or supermajority doesn’t seem to me to make it non-political. I would agree with you, I think that politics is adversarial, that that is an intrinsic part of it, that it is struggles between different interest groups. In fact, as the book goes along, you give us, the readers, various pieces of homework to do. And this was one of the homework questions I did. I did skip some of them. I felt guilty actually, every time I skipped a question, I felt bad.

OT: I hadn’t realised that I would have that effect on people. That’s good to know.

II: Maybe only on me. But you did ask us to write our own definitions of politics. And I said, “Politics is about power struggles between groups representing different ideologies, in order to obtain influence over some larger entity, e.g. the population, the state, etc.” So, I think it’s adversarial. It’s also about voluntary allegiances and about exercising power. So you’re using your popularity to put you in a position where you can exercise power. And in that sense, maybe we could also use it to talk about the example of office politics or something. You’re using your power to influence people and be able to change how things are done on some macro level, larger than you the individual and your immediate concerns.

OT: Yeah. I actually like thinking about things like office politics or academic politics or the sort of quasi-politics of small groups of friends, because the conflicts are so much more raw there. And there’s often no set procedure for resolving them. So somebody might think, ‘This project is being done in the completely wrong way, but my boss has complete control over it. There’s nothing I can do. And nobody is going to look into the details. So what do I have to do? I have to gossip about my boss or discredit my boss in some way.’ So people make these decisions in these sorts of situations about how to undermine or how to lead to some political outcome or some outcome writ large and that’s when non-political settings are at their most political, right? When people are strategizing about how to influence situations of conflict And you know one thing I think you probably saw throughout the book, I’m struggling with this question of what makes political beliefs unique—or are they unique? Maybe are there other classes of beliefs that are similar? I definitely think a good book could be written more generally about the philosophy of conflict. What is a conflict? What do we need to think about when we’re in a conflict scenario? What does it mean to resolve a conflict or to avoid a conflict?

I really like thinking about those. There’s very small scenarios, but those are scenarios that people find themselves in every day and have to try to deal with. So for me, they’re really useful for thinking about how we form these beliefs and how we come up with these strategies.

II: You said, and I think this might be relevant to the political stuff, that a dispute involves a disagreement over a claim, a truth claim, whereas conflict more generally need not involve that kind of disagreement. I don’t know that I agree with that. I can’t think of any example of a conflict that doesn’t involve dispute over a claim. So even, say, you and your girlfriend are fighting over the duvet. There is still an implicit claim: you believe that she has more of the duvet than falls to her fair share and she believes you have more of the duvet than falls to your fair share. And that’s clearly not a political dispute.

OT: But you think it still involves some sort of disagreement?

II: Yeah, I think it still involves disagreement over a claim or is that too far-fetched?

OT: I think maybe you’re being optimistic about human nature. You might imagine that some people, the concept of fair share might not be as prominent in their thinking as it is in yours. So some people …

II: Well it needn’t be fair. Maybe you feel you deserved 95 percent of the duvet and she only deserves...

OT: But even that concept ‘deserve’ might not enter into it, right? I think within the questions of politics, this also enters. You might be in a situation where you simply think, ‘I want 95 percent of the duvet, and I’m going to strategise about how to bring that situation about,’ right? A better example for this wouldn’t be once you have the girl.  Once you have the girlfriend, you’re probably trying to keep things fair and trying to not to heighten conflicts and not to be too acquisitive and too bloodthirsty. But say you don’t have the girlfriend yet and you and another person are pursuing her. You might think that the question of who would it be fair to get the girl … that might not enter your mind. You might think, ‘Well, we both want her and we’re both going to engage in strategies to try to achieve our goal.’ And not only do I not care if the outcome is fair, we also might not expect that she does. Her job is not to like a judge to fairly dispense girlfriend justice in who she picks. Everybody’s goal is to just get what they want in that scenario.

There are theories of politics, some Marxist theories, for example, but I think there are plenty of non-Marxists as well who have similar theories, who think that a lot of our political beliefs, especially our beliefs about fairness or who deserves what or what’s ethical, these ideologies, some people believe they’re just sort of covert. And at the end of the day, most stuff is just about, ‘Well, you and I want the same thing, and we’re going to be, we’re going to engage in conflict, right?’ So, one of the questions at the heart of the theory of politics behind political epistemology is the question of what does belief have to do with any of it to begin with, compared to the role of the more raw conflict. I happen to be somebody who thinks, at least in contemporary politics, belief matters a lot. A lot of people are trying to do the right thing. And as you probably saw in the book I’m not a huge believer in concepts like false consciousness. I think most people genuinely will try to do the things that they think are right, maybe not for the whole world, but for their families and neighbours and things like that. But you can imagine this other scenario where the conflict is much more raw than that and where there aren’t really any beliefs. It’s just a matter of, I want this, you want this, let’s see who wins. Let’s have a fight about it. I think it’s important to leave open, even though I don’t think that that is the central political condition, the way that a Marxist or what’s called a ‘political realist’ might, I also don’t want to rule it out entirely. I don’t want to say that all politics is a matter of disagreement over the facts. I think there are other things involved as well.

II: Yeah, there’s these two models. There’s the rational model, which is, for example, I’m a rational person weighing up different … making judgments about what would be best for society, and then looking at the policies of the different parties and deciding whose policies are most likely to bring about those outcomes. There’s that theory. I’m always quite frustrated by the fact that politicians are not—I think I might have talked to you about this before, so sorry, apologies if this is repetition—but it always frustrates me that politicians are not Brier-scored. Politicians are always saying, ‘This policy is going to lead to these effects.’ When they say that, a little box should come up on the screen and it should say, what’s your level of certainty in this and what’s the percentage of which it will change the needle? So, if this will lead to lower unemployment, you can say, ‘I’m 50 percent certain it’ll lower unemployment by 10 percent and I’m 80 percent certain it will lower unemployment by 5 percent and then we should see a little box on the screen and it should say the all of his prior predictions and here’s his score and we should get a sense of whether you are any good at knowing whether your policies will have the effects you hope or not and we’re never told that.

OT: No, certainly not. So, it sounds like you have a … and I’m very sympathetic to it, it sounds like you believe in a pretty highly rationalistic model of ideal political deliberation. In what I studied for writing the book, the person closest to you was probably Robin Hanson. 

II: Well, ideal, but not that this is the actuality.

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QuilletteRobin Hanson

OT: So, Robin Hanson had a theory called ‘futarchy,’ where he imagined a world in which all political decisions were made not by politicians who were scored in this way, but everybody could bet on, so you could bet little pundit prediction points on outcomes and then if you’re right you get more and if you’re wrong you have less. So, the more correct predictions you’ve made, the more power you have to make future predictions and guide the way policy goes, I think was his system.

II: You still have the dispute about which outcomes you want.

OT: Of course, yeah, yeah. And that’s a really interesting issue because then we get into a quite philosophical issue about the difference between facts and values, right? So it doesn’t seem like values are the sorts of things where we can bet and then five years later it turns out murder is wrong. We all just see it in front of us now. No, if people disagree about values, those disagreements usually persist and they can’t usually be resolved by new facts, although you also have the phenomenon of value change in society. It’s interesting to think about what exactly causes those phenomena. Sometimes they do seem to be based on new information. Sometimes they seem to be pure fashion. Sometimes they’re a matter of older generations dying out and the values of the new generations being adopted. But Hanson was, in his theory, quite clear. He calls it “vote on values, bet on beliefs.” The predictions are for the empirical side and the voting is for the pure value side. So, you might say, we all vote, and we decide it’s better if unemployment is lower. And then we all bet on which policy will most lower unemployment.  

II: One of the problems with politics … I don’t know if this should be a fundamental part of the definition, and maybe I’m getting too far away from philosophy … I’ll try and come back to it in a minute. But one of the problems with politics is you’re often dealing with trade-offs. So you don’t have an absolute value that you can be supporting, but you have to try to do a kind of calculation and often an economic calculation, often a calculation that I feel completely unqualified to make. For example, you have to decide what’s the correct rate of taxes such that we can maintain a good welfare state, but at the same time, we are allowing enough free trade that we have wealth generation. And that’s the kind of thing that you have to make a decision on when you’re voting, a general decision. Like, the taxes that say the Liberal Party, the right-wing party here are proposing, are they too high, or even not high enough or too low? That kind of question requires some knowledge of economics, which I don’t have. But nevertheless, I find myself having strong views about these things, even when they’re too complicated to work out.

I noticed that Brexit was a really clear example of that. People had to vote in a yes/no manner on a topic on which almost everybody agreed that they were completely baffled. I think that Helen Pluckrose read the entire document about the referendum, it was 600 pages or something, and there was a lot of further reading that you had to do at each point, like, ‘to understand this fully, you need to go and read these articles.’

OT: Yeah, to understand every sub-point.

II: So she spent a couple of weeks just reading the Brexit referendum. And I didn’t read it at all. I just voted against Brexit because I thought, Brexit is taking away people’s rights to go and live and work in other European countries and I don’t want that. But perhaps that was the wrong decision. And it’s not even clear to me now because it’s not clear whether things that have gone wrong since Brexit are because of Brexit or because of the way Brexit was handled, etc. It’s just a giant morass. But nevertheless, it absolutely polarised UK society. It was extraordinary. I saw people’s friendships end in real time on Facebook over disagreements on Brexit. People called each other all kinds of names and they made it into a giant ethical issue, even though it was so complicated that I didn’t know anybody who even claimed to have understood what was going on.

OT: Brexit was interesting for me in the US. It was the first issue; it was one of the early issues that got me thinking that I should be thinking more seriously about politics and writing about politics. When Brexit passed, I was in Washington, DC. I remember I had been with family. We had a large family dinner where I expressed my view that Brexit would pass, based on having done a little bit of reading and seeing a little polling and watching the prediction markets. And nobody believed me. And then I was on a Tinder date that night … in DC, this is the sort of thing you talk about on a Tinder date. I expressed my view that Brexit would pass, and my date said, ‘No way.’ And then later on in the night, it went well, and I was able to show her that it had indeed passed.

So yeah, I think it’s interesting what you said. This book is dedicated to a guy named Jeffrey Friedman, who I actually didn’t know that well, but he invited me to a seminar. He was the editor of an academic journal called Critical Review. And he himself had a great book of political epistemology called Power without Knowledge, which is basically about just the sort of issue you’re talking about, the notion that all these choices are too complex. He thinks not just for people like us who are cultural commentators, philosophy people; he thinks Brexit was too complicated for the economists as well. He doesn’t talk about Brexit in particular, but an issue like that. One analogy would be something like, if you build a car, everybody’s responsible for one piece of the car. Maybe nobody understands every single piece. So a lot of decisions about how should society be set up are based on a lot of different parts of society and how they interact. Nobody’s going to have full knowledge of all those things and so we have to rely on these heuristics. And what you expressed was a heuristic, right? The heuristic of, we should vote against things that limit people’s freedom of movement or that limit people encountering people who are not quite the same as them or something like that. Those are the sorts of heuristics people might have used in voting against Brexit.

Similarly, people might have heuristics for voting for Brexit, where they might say, ‘I don’t want people outside my country deciding how things should go in my country’ or, ‘I don’t want people taking advantage of my country,’ or ‘I want my country to stay the same as it was when I grew up. I want to be able to give my kids the same country that I was given.’ These are all like little Zen koans. They guide us, but we don’t actually engage with the details, we just use vibes. I think that’s the level at which most people engage with politics. I think, for me, this isn’t the same as being completely irrational about politics because one thing you can do is, if you’ve used that heuristic, that little phrase for a while, and then you notice that it’s giving bad results, if you say, ‘You know, the policies I vote for keep winning based on this heuristic, but things keep getting worse,’ then maybe you revisit the heuristic, right? So these little ideas we have that help simplify complicated matters, they’re not immune to revision. They’re not completely immune to even replacement. Certainly, you and I both know a lot of people who, in lots of directions, over the past 10 years, have thrown away certain heuristics and adopted new ones, have learned to say, ‘Maybe what I thought about the situation was not the actual truth, maybe I need to learn the heuristics of the other side.’ Certainly, for me, being raised progressive and now being in a lot of conservative circles, it’s been a lot of fun to try on new heuristics. What would a conservative think about the situation? How would a conservative approach the situation? How would they simplify it? What little story or narrative would they tell about it? The other thing that enters into what you’re talking about is the element of groups that we were talking about and the element of trust. You said that Brexit completely polarised British society, [but] likely there were divisions already existing that were ripe for this sort of oppositional thinking.

Who knows what order it happened in, but, if the anti-Brexiteers were the ones who had the strong opinion first, maybe the other side then looked at that and said, ‘Well, here are the experts trying to run my life’ or whatever, so they polarised in the opposite direction. Or if it was the Brexiteers who had the strong opinion first, the other side said, ‘Here are the xenophobes, the nativists, they’re trying to keep Britain in the past, trying to drag us back into the 20th century and away from an interconnected and multicultural world. Often these heuristics, they interact with our view of which group am I a member of, what sorts of people do I trust, what sorts of people do I distrust.

One thing that’s funny in American politics is, the notion that you should be more trusting is also accompanied with a lot of distrust. The notion that you shouldn’t make snap judgments about people based on race or gender or creed or religion in the US is often accompanied by ‘Don’t trust all these racist conservatives’ because, in the, in the progressive mindset, they’re the ones who don’t follow that idea. I think Brexit was likely something that just cut at these sociological divisions and people knew what side they were on, and it was maybe less about people’s expectations of what would happen and more about, ‘What sort of person do I want to win?’ Do I want somebody who’s very pro-the UK to win or do I want somebody who’s maybe more of an expert or more of an EU type to win? And that was probably in a lot of people’s minds that might not have been linked to what they thought would actually happen with the bill.

One thing I’ve thought about a lot: when I talk about political beliefs, a lot of people assume I’m talking about political issues, like, are you pro or anti-abortion, are you pro or anti-immigration. But one thing that you and I both share, we’ve both been doing cultural writing for a long time, we’ve both been on Twitter for a long time, a lot of political discourse doesn’t happen around issues per se, but around these flashpoint events: the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic and what caused the pandemic and what steps should be taken. These events are often … sometimes there’s not even a policy associated with them. Everybody’s just arguing because they want their version of what happened to be true.

There are these staging grounds. I’m really interested in these staging grounds. How does some event become part of the political conflict, an alleged hate crime or something like that. And then there’s a question of whether it actually happened because there’s a lot of hate crime hoaxes, at least in the United States now. And then this is taken to mean our side is more trustworthy than your side, or our side is stronger than your side, or your side makes things up, or these types of events always happen, or these types of events never happen or something like that. I think [in] a lot of these political battles, the heuristics have a lot more to do with what groups we’re a member of, who we can be trusting, which side we want to win out. And it may be that passing Brexit, even if it went badly, maybe that could be good for the Brexiteers in the UK because maybe it could signal their strength as a political party. Maybe they could gain more followers or push the needle even further, move the Overton window. It’s not clear. I think I retweeted some research recently. It’s not always clear that people actually evaluate whether policies work when they decide who to vote for. And then there’s a question of, does that mean they’re irrational? Then you have to ask, what do they care about in their voting behaviour?

There’s just so many factors that go into people deciding which side of these little conflicts they’re going to be a part of. And then you suddenly get something like Brexit, which seems to gather up every other conflict in British life and it just expresses the division so cleanly.

II: Yeah. It seems to be a feature of what is political that it causes clustering. I think at one point you talk about this theory of … I think this isn’t the terminology that is used, but anchoring beliefs. So, you have one central belief about society and that makes you identify with one side or the other, usually of a left-right divide. And then all your other beliefs accumulate, accrete around that, because then the kinds of people that you are more likely to trust, the sources you’re more likely to trust, the arguments you’re more likely to engage with are all related to people who share your central belief. And that central belief allows you to overlook other things that you might disagree with or perhaps to get pushed into the direction of agreeing. That’s definitely how I used to feel about my politics. My central belief was in the importance of a social safety net—not equality, I’m not interested in equality, but I wanted a minimum safety net for people. It doesn’t matter, this is just an example. That is enough to place me on the left and to make me want to describe myself as a leftist. But part of that kind of political stuff is also very deeply tied up with identity and signalling and your sense of yourself and who you are. And this is again a cluster. Where do you group yourself? Who do you ally with? So, although I haven’t changed my view on the social safety net, and that probably still makes me fundamentally leftist because that’s my top priority, after October 7th, I stopped calling myself a leftist. I stopped arguing with people who said that I was right-wing or conservative because of disagreements with the left. I didn’t change any beliefs, but I just changed my self-presentation, because I was so horrified by the hang glider leftists.

OT: That’s a good lot of good phrases you used: ‘hang glider leftism’ and ‘anchoring beliefs.’ So, there’s two models of how an anchoring belief might work. Some people think that you would have an anchoring belief that’s a principle, and I deduce all my views from this principle. Corey Robin, for example, has this book, The Reactionary Mind, and I think his view is something like, all right-wing opinions can be traced to people trying to maintain existing hierarchies and existing structures of dominance, so whoever is dominant in society should remain dominant. Naturally, not only do I not think that that’s a good summary of right-wing views, I also don’t think that there’s any really good summary of right-wing or left-wing views because part of what I took you to be expressing was it’s almost a historical accident that what you call leftism, a belief in a social safety net, is also correlated with this view on a very specific conflict in the Middle East and what should be done about that conflict and whose side we should take in that conflict and to what extent.

So, the one idea is that maybe there are principles that guide everybody’s political beliefs. I think that’s unlikely. What I think is much closer to what you expressed, which is that people have views on a limited number of political issues that they feel very strongly. Then they enter a group based on their views and sort of adopt the other views of people around them. That’s the way that coalitions form, people start out with only a couple strongly held beliefs and they end up with a lot. Now this might be helped along by thinking, ‘Well, of course, I’m so sure about these couple political beliefs. I know anybody who disagrees with me about them, they must be bad people. And the people who agree with me about them, they’re probably good people. So, I’ll just follow the good people on the other issues because now I trust them.’ People likely have, maybe not quite conscious, but people likely have thought processes that are a bit like that.

I think it’s also unlikely that those thought processes are the right way around, but I do think it’s important for people to keep the histories of their political beliefs in their head. Often, you know, people who come to rethink their political allegiances and their political beliefs, they have a moment of, ‘When did I start believing this to begin with? Why did I start saying this? Where did this belief actually come from? What evidence was it based on?’ One thing I realised as I was revisiting my political beliefs in my early 30s, late 20s, is that during college, I was engaging in a lot of what’s called motivated reasoning where I was basically always looking for talking points. So, if there were a right-wing argument against one … I was a moderate leftist in the American context, a sort of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren type. I didn’t want a proletarian revolution or anything, but I would usually like the more lefty democratic candidates in, say, a presidential primary.

And I noticed that, when I encountered an argument against my views, what I would do is I would go shopping around for a response. So, this is one model that I think Dan Williams has proposed, also a great political epistemologist, great Twitter account, has a great blog called, I think, Cultural Cognitions or something like that. And there’s another philosopher, Gabriel Contessa, who says the same things about experts. He says people engage in what’s called ‘expert shopping.’ So when there’s disagreement among experts, we just go and find the expert who agrees with us. So really deferring to experts when there’s controversy can almost be counterproductive. It can be the wrong way to go about things. And I noticed that I was doing this a ton when I looked back and...

I don’t remember what brought me on that topic, but obviously I was feeling a very strong identification with being part of the left such that if any of this set of beliefs were challenged, my first instinct was defence rather than engagement. My first instinct was this debate instinct of how do I parry back? How do I push back? In retrospect, I don’t even know if I was just so sure that we were right, or maybe it was a strategic thing of trying to win. Probably different people are different on that axis. But it’s very striking to me that when people describe these sorts of more clannish or groupish behaviours and the way they affect our political cognition, I remember having exactly that sort of instinct and I can sometimes feel it too in the debates that I feel the most strongly about. Sometimes in the wokeness/anti-wokeness debate, I’ll find myself saying, ‘Let’s find the opposite argument. Let’s find the challenging argument rather than thinking about whether it’ll be true.’

II: There’s also a kind of intellectual temptation. I definitely feel that at Quillette. Somebody recently described Quillette as “a great debunker of orthodoxies.” And of course, there’s a danger if you are, because some orthodoxies are factually true. So you don’t want to just be trying to debunk every orthodoxy. You don’t want to become the prisoner of your own image of yourself as a brave contrarian, fighting against the unthinking masses who just subscribe to the most popular opinion. But it’s also, of course, more intellectually interesting to examine those points and, of course, you know, magazines are there for entertainment. This is a form of entertainment. People presumably enjoy reading. What they want to read is the debunking arguments. So there is a natural kind of move towards that. And for other people, there’s a natural move in the opposite direction, towards conformity.

In Babylon 5, which is a show I think you’ve also watched, a sci-fi show from the 90s, which my personal friends know that I’m unhealthily obsessed with—that and chess are my two unhealthy obsessions. In Babylon 5, there’s a scene where the race called the Drazi have this ritual every, I think it’s five years, where they pick coloured scarves out of a hat at random. Then those who pick the purple scarves are at war with those who pick the green scarves. Some people might think of that as an analogy for politics, that there is something random about the way in which our initial opinions are formed and then we stick to those opinions very firmly or, alternatively we have a conversion. I know a lot of people who claim to have, for example, ‘left the Left.’ This is particularly in the Left-to-Right direction. I think the right are better at ambulance chasing than the Left. So they tend to gather in more refugees.

OT: Yeah, at least in this point in history.

II: And converts are the most fervent and they have this complete amnesia as to what they believed before. If anything, the fact that they believed it before is stronger evidence debunking it for them, which is a completely irrational way of seeing it. But how much do you think is random, i.e. the people we fall in with in early life and the things we’re reading? And how much credence do you give to views like Jonathan Haidt’s view of moral foundations theory, that political allegiance is downstream of personality types.

OT: I think a lot of it is random. I think a lot of it has to do with what settings we’re in, what influences we have, and what influences we react in favour of and what influences we react against. Like a lot of anti-woke people, I’m a huge contrarian, and if you put me in a room full of anti-woke people, I’m going to find some way to annoy them as well. For example, I was at the … you know Heterodox … you’re asking about Jonathan Haidt, of course you know Heterodox Academy. So I was at the Heterodox Academy event in Chicago two weeks ago now. It feels like longer, I’ve been travelling a lot. And one of the first events I went to was about echo chambers versus what they called ‘idea labs.’ And it was run by people I respect, run by friends of mine and they were talking about … They had an interesting frame. They said, ‘First we’ll talk about what would you do if you wanted to set up an echo chamber and what would you want to do if you wanted people to be more experimental in their ideas? I guess the idea was people were going to say, ‘If you set up an echo chamber, you would set up a university the way it’s normally set up now, and if you wanted an idea lab and something more experimental, you would do it more of the Heterodox Academy way. But I don’t like self-congratulatory … you know, patting ourselves on the back. So I said, “Well, if I wanted to set up an echo chamber, I would take a few hundred people who agree with each other about everything and send them to a fancy hotel in Chicago, basically like this entire conference.” Everybody was looking at me very bemused. You were like, “Who’s this person who’s trying to …” But that’s the way I am. So, in that sense, our personalities really will influence things. But of course, that question of what views do I feel the most motivated to take on and express depends also on the fact that I’m a contrarian, that’s still completely dependent on my social milieu, right? Which views I end up expressing and finding important.

Heterodoxy is Hard, Even at Heterodox Academy

Heterodox Academy meeting is any indication, heterodox thinking poses substantially more problems than even the hardworking leaders of Heterodox Academy realized.

QuilletteJohn Paul Wright

I don’t know if you remember the phrase ‘the current thing.’ This is a phrase that people bandied about on Twitter for a while. I think it was at the beginning of the Russo-Ukraine War and I think part of the notion was that a lot of people—and this is true—a lot of people who had positioned themselves experts on COVID suddenly were experts on Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, it’s unlikely that somebody would have robust expertise in both of those matters. But one thing that was pointed out, which I think is completely correct, is that, as you said, opposing the new orthodoxy on everything is just as reactive and just as thoughtless as agreeing with the new orthodoxy on everything.

I was having a conversation with a friend who’s much more pro-orthodoxy than I am. And one thing he correctly pointed out, which is also something we talk about in professional epistemology, people like me will often say, ‘You can’t trust the news. If the news is on something controversial, be careful. They’re probably misleading you in some ways.’ But actually, that relies on us having a grasp of the notion of what’s controversial. On almost every topic, the news is highly trustworthy. If your local paper reports the score of a sports game, they almost always get that right, right? Or if they report that there’s a storm, they’re not going lie to you about that, the weather, they’re probably trying their best. Everybody knows that it’s really hard to predict the weather, so that’s why they get that wrong.  On most issues, we suspect people are probably trying their best. And maybe on political issues, trying your best just works a little differently because we have these oddities of political cognition.

You know, about Haidt’s model of the personality, this is something where Haidt is … I’ve been reading, I had meant to write a review of his book, The Anxious Generation for Quillette, but there’s just so much commentary on it and digesting all the commentary was taking me forever. He’s somebody who is a great academic and also a great public communicator. And sometimes there’s a little bit of a gap between what you have to do in the two cases. So, in terms of his model of political personalities influencing our political beliefs, the question of moral foundations theory, the theory of moral foundations, it’s often expressed as the idea that there are six moral foundations that humans draw on and liberals use three of them and conservatives use all six. First of all, if you look at his data, it doesn’t seem … there’s a very gentle curve where maybe even the way he operationalises it, maybe conservatives draw on some of them more often than others … he splits them up into what he calls “individualising foundations,” which are about treating people fairly, preventing harm to people, allowing people to be free as individuals and things like that. And then there are the other kinds of foundations, which are about purity or sanctity or loyalty, things like that. He thinks that only conservatives have the latter three. One problem is that even in his way of measuring it, it’s really not that stark. And another issue is that I think a lot of the things that came to mind to the researchers as they were thinking about concepts like purity and sanctity were maybe associated with a different time in political history where those concepts might be associated with social conservatism. There’s a worry that they may have been measuring social conservatism directly.  

Certainly, a lot of people when they think about, what would be an American progressive’s reaction to a MAGA hat. You know the MAGA hats, the red hats that say, ‘Make America Great Again.’ You can imagine a progressive being like, ‘Get that away from me. I don’t want to touch that.’ And we had this thing with the OK … do you remember the OK symbol, where suddenly it was decided that this was a symbol of white supremacy?

II: Yeah. That was extraordinary.

OT: It was very extraordinary. To me, it was very confusing that people think that language and communication could work like that. It’s not my vision of how language and communication work. Among other things, it seemed like a reaction that was very based on, ‘we don’t want anything we do, any of our movements, any of our symbols to be associated with anything icky.’ It was sort of like an abstraction of the notion of ickiness where, somebody we really don’t like was photographed making this sign and now the sign is infected. I think you also saw this in the progressive approach to ideas that there was this notion of, if somebody says something horribly racist, it’ll be contagious, and people will just start believing it without ever thinking that maybe people can be trusted a little bit to not suddenly become horribly racist just because one person said something that was horribly racist. So, all this is to say that I think there are plenty of versions of purity, sanctity, loyalty, and the non-individual foundations that match up with social progressivism as it’s instantiated in contemporary American politics. The only people who, to my mind, really lack those sorts of foundations, you might have some really extreme libertarians or libertines, someone like … I don’t know if you know, Aella on Twitter who’s always posting her … Aella, sorry, I never know how to pronounce her name. She’s somebody who strikes me as maybe doesn’t have a felt sense of impurification. She’s missing that sense and it’s an open question whether that’s good or bad. Ethical theorists will debate whether disgust is actually a good basis for morality. Some would say, ‘No, that’s just a misfiring of an evolutionary reaction.’ Other people might say that that reaction has some sort of ethical content to it. That’s a judgment just like any other. I think there are people who lack reactions around purification and sanctification, but it’s much rarer than that theory would make that out to be. What’s more likely is that you have people who are a bit more similar, and it’s channelled into different contexts based on their political milieu, based on their political beliefs, and based on their social setting.

II: Personally, I have no evidence for this, but my hunch about Haidt, about Jonathan Haidt’s work in general … I really love him as a person. He’s a lovely man. All my dealings with him have been wonderful … But I think that it might be likely that he’s a bit like Jared Diamond as a thinker in that he is a little bit wrong about everything, but in a way that’s more interesting and valuable than other people’s rightness.

OT: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. It’s something I think about in my own meta-thinking about how to think and how to write, one of the things you said at the beginning, you pointed out where I said, “We’re all wrong about philosophy, so don’t be so mad at me if I’m wrong.” And you called it ‘covering my butt.’ So, I think Haidt is somebody who got past that instinct to cover himself and would rather give bold theories. And as I continue to maybe write a second book, it’s something that I have to think about that maybe there’s something to the idea of giving a bold theory and not making apologies. Then, if it’s not completely right, even if a bold theory is 90 percent right, that’s still way more interesting than if somebody doesn’t give a bold theory at all. And even if it’s not right at all, the disproof of the theory, you may find something interesting in it as well. So, I do think that the intellectual boldness, and just stating a thesis clearly and saying, ‘Here’s my evidence, and it’s up to you to evaluate it,’ I think it really helps intellectual life.

One thing that probably came out in my book and certainly comes out in my book reviews and my public work in general, I’m very disagreeable. I’m always looking to criticise other people’s work, but there are some people who are wrong in very productive ways for other people’s thinking and there are some people who are wrong in very productive ways. You can be wrong by doing some math wrong or by coming up with a concept that’s meaningless or something like that, or by just being doctrinaire in some way, or by saying something everybody else is already saying. But if you’re wrong by proposing a novel theory that expresses an instinct that a lot of people probably have, that can be incredibly, incredibly generative.

One theme of my book, when it came to topics like democracy and experts and stuff like that, is that epistemologically, what seems individualistic, what we might associate with individualism, things like, ‘I’m going to be contrary, I’m going to come up with a bold theory, I want to think something that nobody else has thought before, I want to have my own ideas,’ things like that, in the epistemological sense, that can actually be more pro-social. And what we think of as going with the herd, that’s actually very risk-averse in a way that is actually rather self-interested. It’s one thing that I found interesting that in some ways the ethics and the epistemology often won’t match. And that taking risks in what we say and what we believe is often the way to help others, even if it can... is not entirely rational when it comes to our own cognition.

II: But is it ethical to be more agreeable? Because I don’t think that’s an ethical question at all.

OT: I think it can be ethical to be more disagreeable. I think it can be ethical to be the one to say, ‘I’m going to propose something nobody else has proposed before. And maybe I’ll be wrong, but I’m going to take a chance.’

II: I put a lot of trust in people who have ideas that aren’t as firmly clustered and maybe this is irrational, too. I’m going to do some patting ourselves on the back here of the kind that you most hate, but it’s one of the reasons that I like Claire Lehmann and Quillette. One of the reasons I came to have more and more respect for Quillette was because I saw Claire alienating Quillette’s base readership by disagreeing with them on, for example, COVID vaccines, where we are in favour. I say ‘we,’ I also agree in favour and many of the readership were against.

OT: Yeah, I’m vaccinated as well.

II: And also, the Ukraine war, where we are strongly pro-Ukraine. I actually think the Ukraine war is a more straightforward moral question. But let’s not get into that. But even if I had disagreed on those issues—and there are other things I disagreed on—I find that a sign of probity. There’s a lack of audience capture if you look as though you’re taking issues on a case-by-case basis, that feels to me like a really strong sign of trustworthiness.

OT: Yeah, I 100 percent agree, and I agree it’s true about Claire, it’s true about Quillette and it’s also true about people I’ve met through writing for Quillette. When I was in the UK in February, I met up with Stuart Ritchie and Saloni Dattani, both of whom are former Quillette writers and they’re both people who if they’ve done their research on some issue, I’m likely to take it very seriously.  

II: They’re lovely.

OT: I think what you said is exactly correct, that having views that are not easily classifiable is often a sign of probity. And we’re always trying to do this thing where we... it’s something you’re told not to do. But when somebody says, ‘Here’s my view and here’s my evidence for it,’ as a shortcut, we don’t just evaluate their argument, we also evaluate them as a person, what’s called ‘ad hominem.’ Strictly speaking, deductively, it’s a fallacy, but it’s the way we operate when we’re dealing with other people. One thing we do is we say, ‘What’s the best explanation of why this person has the opinion that they have?’ And if all their opinions go together, you might say, ‘Well, the best explanation is they’re trying to be a good Democrat or a good Republican or a good alt-right or a good socialist or whatever or a good centrist, where they’re trying to fit in with this or that group of internet friends.’ And if somebody’s beliefs are hard to classify, then it’s harder to come up with that sort of explanation. It’s much easier to say, well, ‘It’s possible that they’re doing some very complicated thing where maybe they’re picking at random on every issue, but more likely they’re actually just doing their research on every issue. That seems like the most likely explanation of their views. Of course, then you have to assess whether they’re good …

II: Yeah, of course. You could have a random bunch of completely wrong views on everything.

OT: Exactly. And there certainly are people who do their research and end up with the wrong answer. They have bad instincts about how to research or maybe just lack the ability for it. But even just having the right motivation when it comes to political issues … and I do think that this is part of … one of your opening questions to me was about what is distinctive about political beliefs or why is this an interesting category or something like that. I do think that the beliefs that are politicised, these are some of the ones where it’s hardest to find somebody where getting things right is their main motivation. When it comes to solid state physics, the people researching solid state physics, all the physicists, you generally think that they’re probably trying to figure it out. That’s why they’re there. They’re probably not there for the big bucks. If they wanted the big bucks, they would be doing something else. Of course, they want tenure and a nice life and things like that. And those motivations have to be evaluated as well. If you see somebody publishing a lot of papers, maybe you say, ‘Well, probably some of these are true, maybe some of them are false.’ Even in physics, you have to do that. So you’re always evaluating people’s motivations. But in politics, in particular, it seems to be hard to find people with the right motivations. And that has something to do [with] the aspects of politics that we discussed at the beginning, the aspects of political beliefs that we discussed at the beginning, are part of what go into that. The motivations of trying to win in what you’re getting done and trying to maintain your standing within your group and maintain your own evaluation of yourself as a good person. For a lot of people, ‘I’m a good person’ means ‘I’m a member of the group that I’m a member of. We are the good people, and they are the bad people.’ That’s part of the difficulty.

But of course, there are other parts of life where you have similar difficulties for different reasons. So for example, I think it can be very hard to figure out what effect a certain medication will have on you because of the same sort of interplay of, it’s a very complex topic, it’s hard to research, and there’s also a lot of motivation and interest in the way some research is conducted in that the drug companies themselves will be doing some of the research. I’m not an expert on any of that, maybe I’m wrong, but just assume I’m right for the purpose of this conversation. That’s actually a lot like the political situation where you have a combination of complexity and bad motivations that make it really hard to figure out who to trust. And I do think that what you said is definitely the first step. The first step in figuring out who to trust is figuring out who really cares about being trustworthy, who’s actually trying to figure out the truth.

II: I think one of the things is that people dislike politics, but people talk a lot about polarisation and the problems with polarisation. And it’s true that in politics you have to get a minimum amount of buy-in from everybody. You don’t want to have a civil war, right, an armed uprising? People have to at least agree that even if they disagree with your policies, they believe in the legitimacy of your right to pass those bills, etc. But also, disagreement is good, right? I’m a Popperian on this. Disagreement is how we come at truth through clashing ideas. I agree with you that I’m sceptical about the marketplace of ideas that certain ideas just circulate … I’m more fond of Darwin’s—it’s a Freudian slip, Dawkins’—idea of memes. Certain ideas are memes and they are good at replicating and that is completely amoral. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily correct or ethical. They’re just ideas that are good at reproducing themselves in people’s minds.

So, I’m not convinced by the idea that ideas are a marketplace, but I do think that the clash of ideas is important. A lot of people seem to have this strong idea that everybody on the other side is ipso facto wrong and also immoral, at least mildly immoral because of their political beliefs, they seem to want a situation in which their side has completely won and therefore there is only one side. That would obviously be a disaster. There might be some utopian scenario in which it was not a disaster, in which we had global Singapore and a benign dictatorship, but that has never happened, that just doesn’t happen. What happens is totalitarianism, etc. And when ideas and people in power go unquestioned, then bad things start to happen. So, I find it very strange, people’s desire to morally dismiss everyone on the other side because disagreement is so central to politics and so important to politics and so important to social welfare.

OT: It’s very interesting. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in what you’re saying. I think one thing you and I have in common, and we get, liberals get attacked from all sides for this. We get accused of not really wanting to win or not being willing to do what it takes to win. But I don’t think you and I are people who necessarily want a complete victory in politics. We wouldn’t trust the other people on our side to wield total power. We might not even trust ourselves to really wield power in society. And we wouldn’t feel comfortable, even in terms of our political beliefs, let alone our political actions, lacking a kind of check on us, right? Lacking somebody who’s being a little critical and saying, ‘You’re doing that wrong. You’re doing that wrong.’ Of course, that bugs us, but at the same time, we might feel that it’s something that we need a little bit, that we can’t completely do it on our own. I think that’s a highly liberal instinct. And in a way, is a better summary of the liberal instinct than some sort of mechanistic marketplace of ideas type notion, which is much more similar to economics. You’re talking more about the heart of a liberal.

The other thing was, you were talking about legitimacy and legitimacy with disagreement. So, the question of disagreement, I think political theorists think about it a little bit differently than people like me, than epistemologists. I’m often thinking about people’s beliefs in terms of well, how can we improve our beliefs? How can we get more things right about politics? With the goal being, let’s get more things right. I think political theorists are more interested in a different kind of question, which is the one that you were gesturing at there. They’re more interested in a question like, given how persistent disagreement is, how can we have a stable regime? How can we have a legitimate regime? How can we avoid civil war? And how can we subsume populations who don’t agree with our way of doing things without it being wrong in some way? How can we force the anti-tax people to pay taxes and it’s still okay? How can we force the anti-gun people to live in states where other people own guns and it’s still okay, or whatever. Obviously this is challenging. Some anarchists believe that political legitimacy is basically impossible, that any state imposition on individuals is illegitimate. That’s what an anarchist thinks, right? There’s this whole tradition of thinking about disagreement less in epistemological terms, the way I do in the book, and more in terms of, what rights do people have and what effects will disagreement have in a political regime? Will it destabilise the regime? Will it make it illegitimate?

A lot of [John] Rawls’s work is about this very issue. One thing after finishing the book that I was thinking about was maybe I should delve more deeply into some of these issues. I could write a whole book about it, most of the chapters could become a whole book if I really wanted to expand on them and make them a little less dense, a little easier to read and go into all the nooks and crannies. But another thing would be to go past the epistemology and say, ‘Okay, let’s think more about what do we do in a society where a lot of people disagree? Will we ever solve the issue of political disagreement? And if not, what’s the politically right thing to do about that?’

It’s like what we talked about at the beginning where, in a way, you can find a way into any question about politics by starting with political disagreement. It’s basically all there in that line.

II: I think we could go on talking for a long time. Unfortunately, though I have to keep the podcast within a certain length and I’d like to end, I think, by reading a little bit from the conclusion of your book, which I hope is not too much of a spoiler:

Okay, what should you take away from this book? What should you do? There are some lessons that we’ve seen repeated throughout this book. One is that people’s motivations for developing their political beliefs are often rather obscure. It’s often inappropriate to question such motives within a political dispute, rather than responding to the content of someone’s speech. But in this meta-context, I think the politically involved reader should ask themselves just what they get out of it. And don’t fall back on slogans like, ‘It’s good to be aware of what’s going on.’ Why is it good? Things are going on everywhere, some of them political, some not. Why is it good to be aware of the political things?

A related lesson is that engaging with politics and even with political information does not necessarily make one more knowledgeable in every important sense. We saw that political information may be associated with high partisanship and with ideological capture. Very well informed readers should ask themselves whether their sustained engagement with politics is best described as an upwards epistemic trend where they continue learning new things and improving their understanding of political reality, or a kind of spiral where they end up more and more certain of the sorts of political beliefs they started out with. The most important lesson, I think, is of the value of independent thought.

It’s rarely rational, rarely intellectually responsible to mold one’s inner life, one’s beliefs and credences to fit the demands of an ever-changing party platform or some bespoke au courant ideology. You’d expect philosophers of all people to understand this, but plenty of philosophers work hard doing just that. (At least they tend to be better at it than other people!) Even when thinking for yourself doesn’t work out that well for you, it works out well for the group. If you must think about politics, try to avoid simplifying frames, stock narratives, and language and concepts that serve a political purpose. I suppose what I want to say is this. Be political as little as you can. Either avoid politics, or do politics in the least political way you can manage.

I went back to graduate school in philosophy in large part to study political epistemology. Back when I did, I agreed with many of the people we’ve encountered in this book that we were in a unique epistemic crisis in American politics, one of bubbles and echo chambers and conspiracy theories and fake news and the competition between various media talking heads who couldn’t evaluate evidence if their lives depended on it. But now I’m not so sure.

First, I’m not so sure things now are so different from what they’ve always been. Technology changes, but people, I think, stay the same. Second, I’m not so sure that the political epistemology I see everywhere isn’t just politics by another name. Accusing others of being enthralled to ideologies and biases and so forth is a political strategy like any other.

Third, I’m not so sure that individual irrationality is what matters. I still get incensed when I see someone making some bonkers claim about politics, especially one that I know they take for granted because of their social milieu, as anyone who’s read my book reviews knows. But sometimes I think that I’m looking at the wrong thing, and that what matters is how it all comes together on the societal level. And if I’m being honest, on the societal level, I’m no longer sure that the problem of political epistemology is the biggest political problem that we have. I wish I could figure out what is.

So, you end by declaring your entire book to be superfluous and irrelevant, telling people not to think about this topic to begin with.

OT: Yeah, well, it’s a little bit of a joke because when I say I wish I could figure out what is … obviously to do that, you need to form political beliefs, which is the topic of the book, right? So, it’s a little bit of a joke at the end, but it’s also a bit serious. When I go to DC, for example, which I often do, there’s plenty of people who are doing research on political issues and trying to solve political problems. People even working across the aisle, people being bipartisan. I think in part that ending is a reaction to how necessary is the thing that I’m doing versus the thing that many other people I know are doing. I don’t know how much sense that makes.

II: So, my take on this is, I think it’s really important to do this kind of meta-analysis if only because it is emotionally calming. Politics is this very turbulent area in which people’s emotions are heavily invested. Some people’s answer to that is a kind of conciliationism, that we need to compromise on everything and take some sort of pure median position. But I think that’s wrong. You know, sometimes the correct position is at one extreme or the other. But I do think that it’s really helpful this kind of examination of how and why we believe the things we believe, that that takes some of the heat off the disputes. And argument and dispute are very necessary. I’m a strong believer in the Christopher Hitchens thing, you know, you should argue with people. You have enough time to be quiet when you’re in the grave. But also, it needs to be somehow just a little bit disentangled from complete demonisation of people who disagree with you. Somehow we need to get from the heated part to a part that is a little bit more self-reflective. And I think this is definitely one of the ways of doing it.

OT: Yeah, so I definitely think that one skill that I have that I think is maybe rarer than I expected, I’m always very happy to describe some political phenomenon in very abstract terms and to abstract away from my own political convictions, perhaps because they’re not as strong as many other people’s. I do think that that can be very useful for a lot of people. So, I do think that that’s certainly a strength of the book. And I hope that … in a lot of ways I do think of this book as being influenced by my history with the so-called Intellectual Dark Web or with Quillette. I think of it as a sort of distillation of some of the guiding ideas that people like us have had and the way we’ve thought about politics or tried to avoid thinking about politics in another sense. So, I definitely think that the book can be very useful. I think it’s a little bit different though than saying … I think a lot of people go into politics saying, ‘There’s some problem of political irrationality that people have that I can go in as the rational one and I can then go in and solve.’ As I was writing the book, it really didn’t seem that simple and I didn’t come to such clear answers about what it would even mean to be the rational one. I didn’t end up with such confidence that I was the rational one.

But yeah, I love hearing that. I love it when people tell me that.

II: Yeah, I mean, the bar is low, but all the same.

Thank you so much, Oliver. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you.

OT: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s always great talking to you.