An insightful, thought-provoking piece which perhaps paints a somewhat idealistic picture of how democracies work. Mr. Harari clearly understands the impact of differences in power and influence on elections and government decisions. But an explicit acknowledgment of how these factors distort the ideal of one person, one vote would have strengthened his argument.
Corporations unquestionably exercise an outsized influence over government policies that affect their interests, including ones that relate directly to the issue of climate change. The need for massive campaign chests to win elections in the US provides an opening for business influence that other groups struggle to match. Any analysis which fails to deal with this threat to democracy, exacerbated by the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, ignores a topic critical to the survival of a free society.
114
The forces eroding truth in society today are so pervasive and technologically potent, it is questionable whether the independence of media, courts of justice, or academia can offer ballast to stabilize our sinking democracy. A great many readers here have expressed similar concerns.
Look closely at Jordan Gale's photograph that was selected for this article. It is all the same thing - but many forms. It is the shadowy image of Pete Butigiege from various spotlights at different angles. It looks like a crowded stage and, like the truth, it takes on many apparent forms and shapes, but in the end, it's still just Pete.
Some media outlets bend and reshape the truth in a manner that is only generously described as propaganda, if not artful subversion. But just like the many Platonic forms of a presidential candidate caught in the spotlight's glare, a dishonest media must also betray its many artful positions, some of which are not mutually consistent with truth.
Even though effective truth discovery requires an intellectual capableness not found equally among all individuals, the Truth itself is - fortunately - stubborn and implacable. It is a big dumb animal that refuses to obey commands and will not move aside when asked.
The obduracy of truth is exactly what makes it feared among charlatans but worth discovering by the rest of us. Our shadowy perceptions of it may shift, stretch, and reshape, but the thing itself has meaning, is unchanging, and is worth knowing.
25
@Thomas
Thank for your eloquent and intelligent comment. As we are experiencing a little Trump-esque obfuscation of truth in Australia, it is comforting to believe truth will ultimately prevail.
6
The 3/5ths Compromise was a peaceful compromise between people who wanted different things. Giving up on reconstruction after the Civil War and accommodating the Jim Crow south was a peaceful compromise between people who wanted different things.
The problem is for much of our history “peaceful compromises” were made on the backs of people who were oppressed. And those compromises were more than just wrong— they were evil.
The problem we have in this country is that we have reached a point where we can no longer compromise because one side of the aisle would rather separate kids from their families and lock them in cages than pass comprehensive immigration reform. One side of the aisle would rather steal a Supreme Court seat from a sitting president than allow it to be taken by a nominee who was a compromise candidate (a moderate who was old enough to not be on a bench a generation from now).
One side of our democracy doesn’t want to compromise. They want to hold the government and the whole country hostage.
What is an election under those circumstances?
180
The elections increasingly are the guns and bombs, that's the problem.
2
It is an excellent essay that clearly spells out the difference between truth and desire. You are entitled to your own desire. But you are not entitled to your own truth. Your desire may be for all human beings to be equal. The truth is that people are not equal in their natural endowments, and that every attempt to establish perfect social equality has failed. Your desire may be for for nature to be benevolent and helpful. The truth is that nature is blind and amoral. Your desire may be for universal peace. The truth is that there has never been a human culture free of violence. Voters are free to pursue their collective desires but not at the expense of the facts. Once they believe they can remake reality to suit their utopian dream or populist hatred, the result is a totalitarian dictatorship. Whether this dictatorship is called fascist or socialist is immaterial. In “1984” the Party functionary tells the protagonist that there is no objective truth. But 2+2 still equals 4.
6
You will like strawberries and cream...bio- infor- mology.
How do we safeguard media? At this point, as far as I know, publications I consider truthful are not suffering censorship. This is comforting. What I do see as different, from years gone by, is the high degree of misinformation and pandering to sensationalism.
Each new step in technology is difficult to adjust to.
1
Hey, where'd you get that joke? My dad was telling that joke 50 years ago!
Trump must be removed as we may lose our democracy if we allow Trump with McConnell and Barr to rule as America's first dictator. It was said when fascism comes to America in be in the form of the cross (evangelicals) and the flag (trump hugging the flag) it's here now folks . Truth will be first casualty of Trump's dictatorship in 2021 as he said something must be done about the media ,based on his admiration of Putin and KIm we know what system he wants.
2
There may be some compromise in voting, however the knowledge needed to vote in a democracy where sometimes great issues must be decided demands truth. Truth about facts, as global warming real or, more recently, the realistic chance of catching a recently discovered virus and the chance that it may kill you. Also, there are basic statistics that show that how likely you are to die a violent death depends on whether or not you own a gun. Or what is the most efficient use of taxes to better serve all citizens.
There are truths out there, yet politicians and voters refuse to believe them or just don't care. And our society suffers. That's why knowledge and basic truths have been important since the beginning of time. Sadly, when people want power so much they deny truths, they destroy people, countries, lives.
Today, there are a lot of lies flying everywhere and it is taking too much work for some people to find the truths that would make their lives better. They are chained to miserable, poor lives by crooked politicians and the lies they spread. That is very tragic. Democracies are formed, newspapers protected, education promoted and libraries built to protect people from the tyranny of a power hungry liar like Trump, but everyone has to want honesty and trust each other's good intentions. It's not compromising with liars that makes a democracy, it's figuring out what is real, what works and compromising to agree on that.
2
This is a naive essay about democracy. Why? Staggered primaries, superdelegates, gerrymandering, electoral college, PACS, social media rethoric and lies hat would make Goebbels blush, voting procedures without a paper trail, and cheating by the current president. This miasma of interference assures that democracy is an illusion.
18
I like most of what you say but I question the following: "First, academic institutions, the media and the judicial system have their own internal mechanisms for fighting corruption, correcting bias and exposing error."
Academic institutions in the US have become dominated by Democrats and progressives. This is especially true in the humanities which are the fields which should supply us with wisdom. Add to it the recent tendency of progressives to brand anyone who thinks differently as racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever.
And that means that reasonable discussion becomes impossible even in universities, or perhaps more there. I know you are gay. But having read YOUR book, I do not see very many distortions. But I do see distortions in much of academia, and people are literally afraid to open their mouths. I myself was "investigated" for saying that Russell, Turing, Goedel and Hilbert were men. This is scary and not conducive to free discussion.
So please do not look to universities. They have abandoned free thought in favor of doctrine.
2
Very well said. Thank you.
One of our political parties has willfully embraced ignorance and deliberate distortion of the facts (i.e., the truth). To that end, it has tried to fabricate and propound an alternative reality – which is totally fake, and which exists only to suppport a political agenda.
To do this, this party has attempted to muzzle the truth, to drown it out and to manipulate media so that non-experts may become confused as to what is actual fact and what is simply a lie propounded with the sole goal of justifying a political priority.
As is usually the case when one group endlessly repeats lies, people begin to believe them. Hitler once said that if you repeat a lie enough it becomes true.
To accompany endless lying, blaming specific groups for society's ills and individuals' failures becomes a key weapon in such liars' armamentarium. THOSE people (or subhumans, or dehumanized and vilified groups) cause _____ (whatever problem you wish to name).
The road to totalitarianism isn't usually goose-stepping morons with swastikas. It is usually ordinary folk who love to hate, who accept lies without question and who wish to deny others those things that they themselves enjoy.
2
A democracy in the 21st century needs an informed electorate. While a Ministry of Truth, because it is corruptible, might go too far, Fox News should be banned, and voters need to demonstrate they are informed and can think rationally and critically, just as much as they need to demonstrate their age, citizenship, etc.
Please don't nitpick in the gray areas. Should someone who is utterly convinced of any or all of the following be allowed to vote:
1) Trump was sent to us by God to be president.
2) Vaccines are an evil plot by the government.
3) The Holocaust never happened.
4) Hitler was overall a good guy.
5) Whites are the supreme race.
6) Our troubles are caused by immigrants.
6
It seems to me that neither side bothered to explain to the British people what the economic and personal results of Brexit would be. Would you, for example, no longer have easy access to the critical medicines you get from other European Union nations? Would the National Health Service be deprived of critical personnel with origins in other EU nations? The pro-EU people assumed they would win and didn't bother to explain what was at stake. The pro-Brexit Boris Johnson faction didn't care about the consequences.
2
American people are not stupid at least the voting Democrats. I wouldn’t go so far to say the red state GOP people have a clue at how they are being used the GOP doesn’t care about them
Democrats will win every seat because GOD don’t like traitors
1
Reading this, I immediately thought of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sanders is, by any reasonable criterion, a charlatan and a fraud. He has admitted having no idea what his proposed policies will cost. He and his surrogates and followers will not engage ideas on their merits, but rather claim to be fake news the slightest questioning of the party line. People, it's not only the far right, it's the far left also. They are mirror images. One is a disaster, and the other would/will be.
4
That this essay turns on experts vs. citizens is entirely appropriate to what has been going on in the U.S. in recent years. We have had a revolt against experts that has channeled matters in unfortunate and destructive ways. With the internet at the finger tip, with outright, as opposed to subtle, propaganda flooding public debate as never before in American history, suddenly everyone is an expert, or thinks they are. They are an experts and, worse, the only one needed, aside from a radio talker who makes money by pumping up anger and division.
This is a fundamental shift in American attitudes. A huge portion of the public now doesn't want to "get along" but rather vanquish those with other views because they see themselves as mistreated and aggrieved. About what? As the saying goes, "what you got?" Anything. The modern world.
The vote for Trump was in part a rejection of experts and the traditional, fading points of national leadership. It was also a slap in the face of the Republican party, a party that had been nominating the safe choices of the third or fourth generation of wealthy families for generations. It must have scared the pants off "country club" Republicans, so they put their pants back on and joined the chaotic parade.
5
"Elections are about finding compromise among people with vastly different desires."
Or, honoring the desires of the greater portion, when compromise is not attainable.
That's why the Founders of the US structured the election process the way they did, to give the greatest chance at achieving compromise through balance and limits.
Most of the commenters here, however, have been brainwashed into thinking that a few cities with high concentrations of population should be allowed to dominate the politics of the entire nation.
The Founders designed the electoral process precisely to nullify that excessive population weighting.
As a result, the elitist's dreams of a statist-collectivist paradise have been derailed, by the rest of the nation, and there are a lot of sour grapes.
And denial.
Truth ?
Here's one.
Trump was telling the truth about the FEMA aid to Puerto Rico all along.
They found all the goods squirreled away in warehouses.
Front page news in Puerto Rico, but a minimalist and fleeting treatment here in the Times, where anything that doesn't portray Trump as the devil and advance the goals of the left, is buried.
The truth is out there. And it isn't, here.
2
Excellent essay. But I don’t see in here a solution to the problem of The New York Times. How does a democracy recover from the rise of a powerful media outlet which distorts the truth so consistently and helps elect corrupt politicians who benefit from this distortion and who seek to further erode democracy? What is the corrective?
3
The author says several times"In a democracy, the government represents the will of the people.". No, the people elect (or think they do) their representatives. What the elected people do (i.e. the government) is seldom what their voters expected them to do. So, no, the government does NOT represent the will of the people, at least not necessarily so.
Any truth dependent on desire is indistinguisable from magical thinking.
I agree with your thoughts and conclusions, however I've come to think one should rarely say "should" these days. Same thoughts work better with "must", or similar words invoking an urgent call to action.
1
To me, this essay reads as a call-to-arms for academia and the Fourth Estate (and indeed other muli-disciplinary subject matter experts) to dig in and relentlessly make their case that illustrates how and why government has got both its procedures and deliberations off course and is failing the citizenry.
But also, that these reflections are not merely limited to the subject of these recent proceedings but deconstruct and review with new vigour ALL of the policies and behaviours of government and the executive.
Someone questioned in a comment, "but what about FOX, how do you counter their influence?". In my opinion, an example of the answer is on the very pages we read here.
The New York Times editors and journalists have taken on that task and do it with a combination of intelligence, diligence, and integrity. They fact check, they bring to the fore the opinions and learning of subject matter experts to filter and recast debate - to separate opinion from fact, the contestable from the un-contestable, truth from fiction, fantasy from reality. They allow and facilitate the re-publishing of this content in global media to assist in ensuring informed and educated debate, assisting 'we the people' as we attempt to make responsible decisions.
So I read this essay as a call for civil society and its institutions to stand up, speak out, and be counted - as this is the voice of 'we the people' and in a democracy government is our institution.
6
The question of the 2020 presidential election is an existential one. Should an impeached president with authoritarian impulsive’s be reelected what are the consequences. In this the ideal expressed in the sentence defining elections as “a method for reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people” will be tested to the breaking point.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is a term used to describe Trumps critics indicating an irrational fear or hatred of Trump unconnected to reality. The problem is that Trump inspires derangement in both his supporters as well as his opponents. Trumps supporters also are irrational & their trust and affection for Trump is just as unconnected to reality as his critics. So if you’re bias neutral you see Trump derangement everywhere. Why, because Trump inspires extreme emotional reactions in both supporters and opponents.
So fast forward to the election. Trump wins or Trump loses, how do we reach peaceful compromise in the face of extreme provocation? If Trump wins it will make the triumphalism of the post senate impeachment acquittal look downright blasé. If he loses he will not gracefully accept defeat and will sabotage the outcome in any way possible. How then do we reconcile the conflicting desires of different people. You see we’ve never had someone like Trump, a president who is “above the law”, certainly not with the support of one of the political parties. How then will we reconcile desire without conflict?
4
I have no doubt that Mr. Harari is a genius, plain and simple, as seen in this essay and in his books. And for that reason I find it difficult to understand his basic thesis, that elections control which desires will be catered to, but should play no role in determining truth. In his climate change illustration, he explains that elections should determine such questions as whether we allow the polar bears to die out, whether certain areas be flooded, and whether we should slow production to lower carbon emissions--but not to ascertain whether climate change is really happening, really being caused by human activity and is becoming irreversible. But the desires we have vis-a-vis handling our climate will depend on which version of the truth we accept. If one candidate says the whole matter is a hoax, climate is not changing--and therefore we should not do anything about it, certainly not interfere with economic growth to regulate carbon emissions---that we should encourage "beautiful coal" mining--isn't this candidate running on his version of the truth, and voting for him becomes an expression of accepting his truth? So at times we vote our desires, but then again we also vote simply for what we see as the truth.
2
"Vote for a party that tells people that they have the right to elect whatever government they like..."
For 120 years, people have been calculating that a doubling of preindustrial CO2 will raise Earths temperature by 3C. We know it is 3C because they showed their calculations. Yet, society at large has obviously preferred those people who have said, for 120 years, 'No it Won't', despite the fact that in all that time they have never shown their calculations.
"but they cannot elect whatever truth they like."
And after 120 years of denial, that truth is hard upon us.
2
The role of morality in choice is equally important to the access to truth.
The voter who looks at the accomplishments of the civil rights struggle, women's movement, access to education, and preservation of the environment, and thinks they have sacrificed for these gains, now sees government and institutions as overstepping into their lives. The GOP is really now the Tea Party/Libertarian, functioning on mistrust of institutions.
This anti goverment voter and the people they elect ( Trump, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell and more) never attempt any gesture of compromise or reconciliation and their policies do nothing but erode our democracy.
Those of us who do support the ideals guiding our democracy, and just support the agreement to be governed, and participate in that government, now have an especially important job to do as the article suggests, to compromise if needed to form a majority that can outnumber the voters who aim to replace ideals with self interest.
4
Professor Harare's closing argument is that "if you want to preserve democracy, vote for politicians who respect the institutions that investigate and publish the truth. Nice advice, but it will be lost on almost half the population. The explanation can be found two paragraphs above: "The typical populist leader flatters (I would have said brainwashes) people by telling them the only thing that matters is their desires." Lacking the ability and/or willingness to reason critically, these voters will continue to be swayed by demagogic politicians, thereby weakening the checks and balances that undergird any democracy.
In an ideal world, when citizens are confronted with a truth claim, they will ask those making the claim to answer the following questions:
1. Is there any evidence to support the claim?
2. What kind of evidence (anecdotal, case studies, surveys,
correlational research, experimental research)
3. How much evidence is cited?
4. What is the quality of the evidence?
5. Do the conclusions logically follow from the data or do
they go beyond what the data allow?
Sadly, we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world where too many people treat the truth test offered above as the nonsensical ravings of a coastal elite (even though I'm a small town midwestern elite).
4
The problem is that people who choose their own truths also reject institutions like academia, journalism, and the courts. Like Yuval Levin's op-ed last week, Yuval Harari's op-ed seems to urge the people to re-embrace the institutions they've rejected. The solution is not to ask the people to obediently re-kindle faith in old institutions, but create better self-checks that prevent the scandals of the past. The self-checks in media, academia, and the courts have failed in many public scandals. You can add religion and business too. Autocrats have kindled this cynicism to their advantage, creating a world where they people only trust their emotions and their leader. There's only way out. The institutions must embrace grassroots checks that earn the people's trust.
2
Ultimately, a society will encounter a problem that the political system cannot deal with. These problems tend to be far-reaching, non-political, and rooted in a inconvenient truth. Take the Coronavirus or Climate Change as examples. Neither the plebiscite, nor the ruling class, nor the academics desire the the horrible consequences brought by these truths, but the truth cannot be willed away. When the time comes we will be forced to respond not because our our desire but because truth demands it.
4
Truth seems to be the enemy of fascism. This is perhaps the basic reason that Putin carried out a strategy of bombarding people with so much information that the truth seemed impossible to discern from lies. Steve Bannon is an advocate of this technique and Trump uses it every day with his tweets. The technique used by Bannon and Trump; is not propaganda which is to convince people of a certain point of view. Rather the aim is to produce chaos. It certainly appears to have worked for Putin who was able to rather quickly transform Russia from a democracy to a fascist state and it seems to be working for Bannon and Trump in the US as they work to create a fascist state here. However, because of the long history of democracy in the US and its strong democratic institutions it is still remains possible that Bannon and Trump will fail to achieve their goal. The upcoming election will be a good test of whether or not they are succeeding.
4
But Dawkins was right - some decisions are too complex and have effects too profound for a yes/no vote of the mass population be be a reasonable thing to do. For these types of issues, plebiscites generally have a terrible record of reaching the right decision (see: Proposition 103 in California).
That is why modern "democracies" elect bodies of representatives. Their job is to be more intensive in receiving and analyzing these kinds of complex questions. The problem with Brexit was that David Cameron abdicated Parliament's responsibility in a cheap play to win a single election because he had to get the voting public to ignore 5+ year of misrule after the financial crisis.
1
Truth vs desire -- what a convenient false dichotomy! Such a construction enables one to choose which questions are best left to "experts" and which are properly reserved for "the people." But it also enables one to ignore critical issues such as framing and its role in deceit. If the Brexit question is phrased in a way which skirts the question of truth (stay or go?), the answer is yes; if framed differently ("Should Britain damage its economy and limit job growth by leaving the EU?") the answer is quite different. Oh, and one thing: all citizens in the US do NOT have equal voting rights. I know; I asked the experts.
3
If you think what you want is the truth
Your thinking is like some of our youth
This writing helps me cope
In fact it gives me hope
My thanks is to Harari the sleuth
1
@Larry Greenfield - With respect, would you entertain the use of a contraction to allow the metre to scan more smoothly in the second line? Instead of:
“Your thinking is like some of our youth”
Would you compromise with a contraction to achieve one less syllable? As in:
“Your thinking’s like some of our youth”
Small, yes, but it does scan better while retaining the same meaning.
It might even be the truth.
1
If professor Harari really thinks that all citizens have equal voting rights he needs to think again. He might even consider doing the thinking in North Carolina, which is gerrymandered up to its collective eyeballs.
5
@Edward Baker Add California to that mix. It’s one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation.
2
Has anybody ever thought about making a news network that exists only to call out Fox News’ lies? I would watch such a network where Fox played behind the anchor in real time and he/she called out everything untrue out of their mouths. This network’s job would be to literally dismantle their lies in real time. I think this would be a hit.
4
“... the truth should not be subordinated to the will of the people, because people very often will the truth to be something other than it is.
“For example, leftists fundamentalists very much desire the LBGT agenda to be true and the binary nature of sex to be false. However, even if 90 percent of voters are leftists fundamentalists, they should not have the power to dictate scientific truth or to prevent scientists from exploring and publishing inconvenient truths.”
How does that work in reality?
4
This essay outlines exactly what is happening in India, rampant totalitarian leader chosen with humongous mandate. Every time he takes on dais he starts with asking people their desires and demands and then goes on drawing parallels with distorted history; a new narrative is created which is then published and pushed via media houses. First thing Modi does is to deny truth, he distorted Gandiji's death, he modelled his killer as hero, he managed to rewrite history in school books in many BJP ruled states and much more.
The fact that developing and educating (in process) society is vulnerable to loud voices and religion is being manipulated completely denying them the chance to seek truth is unnerving, specially for coming generation, who might have different definition of TRUTH.
1
Systemic bias; not systematic.
3
Harari wrote in his concluding paragraph: "if you want to preserve democracy, vote". Too many presumptions here, but they must not be left unchallenged.
Why should "democracy" be preserved? It's a holy cow like any fictitious belief. BTW: fictitious is a word used frequently in Harari's books. Look it up.
Besides, there are many forms of democracies, or how democracy is implemented. USA democracy is predominantly a popularity contest based on money. One could not enter any race in USA without backing of money. China claims to implement a form democracy based on combining meritocracy and popularity within the one-party structure. UK's parliamentary democracy is yet another form to fool the voters that their votes mean something, they are not. Many essays have been written about UK's democracy too.
Voting is just another holy cow. Voting based on desires guarantee unhappiness. People have different desires. They do not all agree to compromise away their desires. The desire to ban abortion or ban gay marriage based on voting? The desire to ban a religious cult (i.e. a fictitious myth) based on voting? Voting is a terrible way to decide the future of a nation, as demonstrated by Brexit.
One person's freedom is imposition to another person. Freedom dogma is yet another holy cow. Individual's selfish interests either set free or repressed by voting is hardly the solution to safeguard the well being of a nation.
@Observer And yet individual freedoms and democracy along with capitalism are the largest factors for reduction of poverty. There is less extreme poverty now than any time in world history.
I think it was Mencken who said: “democracy is the worst form of government...except for all of the others”
2
What if what they want is war on you and everything you care about? What if they are in mortal combat with the very idea of reality? You say 'truth', that's fine and good. But they are bellicose and insane and are making America as twisted as their messed up and malevolent souls
Your point is a good one, but when you say, "all citizens have equal voting rights", you are not quite right. In America, citizens of the red states get more voting rights than those of us who live in the blue states. Hence we have an unrepresentative Senate that covers for the liar-in-chief.
1
That’s because the constitution framers designed the system that way. That is the truth. This is so that yours is a union of states. ( the clue is in the name )
A representative system that ignores the vast empty middle and favours the population centres at the coasts is a recipe for ( even more ) dissatisfaction and instability. Win the middle don’t blame the system
Also it’s worth wondering .. why didn’t the Dems bring legislation to disband the electoral college during the Obama or Clinton administrations? They might not have got the 2/3rds but it would have certainly made their position clear.
3
@Mark Lai National government, above all else, should exist to be a place of compromise. State governments exist for more Democratic activities where only a simple majority is needed to enact legislation.
1
DKSF,
I am talking about my friend, President Trump. Of course, I am sure you knew that.
1
The two parties argue business should be able to pay the lowest wages they can. Have you really heard the Democrats argue for higher wages except for civil servants and female CEO's? Are you sure with all those legal six figure speaking fee's they get you're first an foremost? How do they do it? They play us against each other and blame Russia.
You have more in common with Fox news viewers than you think. They have convinced you don't and your differences to big to overcome. Who gets the money?
1
One good thing might come out of this period in our history, with all of the books written and opinions published surrounding this impeachment. We have seen cracks exposed in our theory and practice of the Balance of Powers. My understanding has been that each branch is answerable to the other two when disputes over actions are contested. So the Legislative answers to both the Executive and the Judicial, The Judicial to the Legislative and Executive, and the Executive to the Legislative and Judicial.
So, when the President running the Executive branch commits High Crimes, even though the House has the sole power to impeach, should not the Judicial also be weighing in? Why aren't the decisions of the Legislature, both minority and majority, and the defenses of the Executive, subject to Judicial oversight?
As it stands, if the Senate majority is the party of the President, only that Majority can remove him. It might take as few as 51 people to "undo an election", all beholden to their Majority Leader and the good will of the President if they are to win funding for their states.
Schiff pointed this out, and it is apparent new rules need to be decided to adapt the Founder's plan to remove a bad President to today's sorry state of integrity and honor in our Senate. The old rules don't work when criminal behavior becomes status quo, and even very wealthy people can be bribed to look the other way as the Constitution is redacted to fit a transactional President.
1
I'd to know why people believe in absolutes when they know most of the information they're taking in is not true.
In 2020 every news outlet takes some sort of a "side" in what they are reporting. I'm old enough to remember when the nightly news had an "Editorial" segment usually at the end of a broadcast. Now Editorializing is considered "real news" Twitter is a "trusted" news source and most people get their daily news from FaceBook.
I don't understand why those who care about the direction the press/media is going have decided that this is all OK?
1
Professor Harari writes: "No matter in which country you live, if you want to preserve democracy, vote for politicians who respect the institutions that investigate and publish the truth."
So in November, some 40% of the voters will vote for Trump because they have been brainwashed into believing that Trump is a politician who respects "the institutions that investigate and publish the truth." Namely Fox News. Desire is easily manipulated, in which case the question becomes: Is it still respectable?
3
I have just one quibble with Harari's fine essay--his dismissal of Richard Dawkins's complaint about submitting Brexit to the voters. Harari says Brexit was about desires, not fact, and there is no reason to defer such questions to experts. But this response ignores that there are various ways to adjudicate competing desires. In most of the western world, the system that has evolved since the Enlightenment is representative democracy. The voters judge who would best represent them in a governing body, and the governing body then makes the hard decisions.
Those decisions require the governing body to weigh competing facts and desires--a process that would be nearly impossible for individual voters to undertake. Whether or not Great Britain should remain in the EU is a topic of incandescent complexity. The point is not that experts should therefore make the decision (which Dawkins in-artfully suggested); it's that elected representatives should make that decision.
Yes, the Brexit question is about public policy rather than "truth." But who said that all policies should be put to direct vote? Almost no one, since the days of New England town meetings, or maybe Periclean Athens. Direct democracy arguably works in those small scale settings; it clearly does not in a complex modern world. The voters do their best, but they invariably rely on gut feelings. Representative democracy is the system that makes intelligent compromise possible.
1
If the popular vote loses to a fractional Electoral College, we have already given up our democracy.
2
Pardon me for sounding post-modern but, let's be honest, "truth" is a function of power. Yes, certain self evident truths (e.g. 2+2=4) are obvious but trivial. Important truths, about the best way to govern ourselves or the dangers posed by climate change etc. are factual questions so complex as to be all but indistinguishable from preferences (desires).
Prof Harari has made a false distinction: all important truths are questions of desire. Unfortunately, in the absence of pure philosopher-kings, everyone's opinion "counts" at least when it comes to things that matter.
This is why the main goal of Trumpian/Fox propaganda is not to contradict specific truths. Rather, it is to discredit the idea that truth is available anywhere but from them. That strategy is working very well indeed.
1
Harari misrepresents Dawkins' objections to the Brexit vote. Of course people who are not experts can have feelings about leaving the EU or remaining in it. And those feelings do not have to be based on any economic rationale. What Dawkins was objecting to is that leaving/remaining involves trade-offs, and people who are not experts may not know what those trade-offs are likely to be. It would have been one thing to vote Leave if one thought (not felt - thought) that both the social and the economic consequences would be positive, and quite another to vote Leave if one thought the social consequences would be positive enough to outweigh negative economic consequences. I do not suggest this is not a valid position - but many of those pushing Brexit *lied* about the likely economic consequences. That is what Dawkins was talking about.
2
Harari misrepresents Dawkins' objections to the Brexit vote. Of course people who are not experts can have feelings about leaving the EU or remaining in it. And those feelings do not have to be based on any economic rationale. What Dawkins was objecting to is that leaving/remaining involves trade-offs, and people who are not experts may not know what those trade-offs are likely to be. It would have been one thing to vote Leave if one thought (not felt - thought) that both the social and the economic consequences would be positive, and quite another to vote Leave if one thought the social consequences would be positive enough to outweigh negative economic consequences. I do not suggest this is not a valid position - but many of those pushing Brexit *lied* about the likely economic consequences. That is what Dawkins was talking about.
1
Harari misrepresents Dawkins' objections to the Brexit vote. Of course people who are not experts can have feelings about leaving the EU or remaining in it. And those feelings do not have to be based on any economic rationale. What Dawkins was objecting to is that leaving/remaining involves trade-offs, and people who are not experts may not know what those trade-offs are likely to be. It would have been one thing to vote Leave if one thought (not felt - thought) that both the social and the economic consequences would be positive, and quite another to vote Leave if one thought the social consequences would be positive enough to outweigh negative economic consequences. I do not suggest this is not a valid position - but many of those pushing Brexit *lied* about the likely economic consequences. That is what Dawkins was talking about.
Thanks to the Times for this. After reading all three Harari books I became something of a Harari fan even though I retain some reservations about his views on free will. The questions he raises, however, about the confluence of artificial intelligence and biotechnology and our readiness to deal with ever more sophisticated and pervasive algorithms should be required reading.
I woke up this morning knowing the Superbowl was over and the Iowa Caucuses would take place. I never thought the fear would cause even the stately NYT to start printing the truth we needed to save us from ourselves.
I live in Quebec not far from the Vermont border and we are committed to a fact based future. Bill 21 forbids outright display of religious superstition by many of our citizens and bans religious icons on the walls of our public spaces especially classrooms. court rooms and political chambers. Yarmulkes, turbans, large crucifixes and hijabs are no nos even in our hospitals.
Bill 21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_ban_on_religious_symbols
is the law of our land and is under attack not by our religious believers but by liberals everywhere who believe the right to believe and indoctrinate is the least we can do to assuage the feelings of those who prefer to believe the unbelievable.
Bill 21 should have been the legal part of separation of church and state long ago. America is in a panic because your country let the camel back in the tent and has no way to get it back where it belongs in closets and shrines throughout your land.
1
This probably goes a long way in explaining why Canada has no Bill of Rights
2
The sad fact is elections should be about the truth, but they are not. People's desires don't happen in a vacuum, they are shaped partly by the irrational (emotion/religious belief), but they also should be shaped by facts. One of the reasons that the government pushed for universal education in the US (at least in the north pre civil war) was that they wanted an electorate able to vote on facts, to make rational decisions. The problem with desires and beliefs is that they lead, not to rational decision making, but electing people like Trump and the GOP that sits still for them. You might argue that people have the right to vote their desires, and of course they do, but that is what causes what you see in Europe, where countries like Hungary and Poland are reverting back to 1930's fascist like governments. In the US, we see a world where the fundamentalist Christians are being allowed to use their beliefs to govern society, despite the fact they are a minority, we have courts and judges and legislatures who call 'religious liberty' the right for religious numbnuts to impose their beliefs on others, and want to know something? The truth doesn't matter much when religious bigots can use their beliefs to hurt people, make them conform to their beliefs, live the way they want. Libertarians claim that is a good thing, but they to be honest are naive idiots, because the natural state of human beings in not rational thought, it isn't tempered emotions, it is lord of the flies.
2
"there is no reason to privilege the desires of experts over those of everyone else."
That's balderdash, and the idea that Joe Sixpack should be listened to over Dr. Smartypants at the root of so many of the predicaments we find ourselves in. Dr. Smartypants has his flaws, but Joe Sixpack is an idiot.
1
Thomas Jefferson said something like: For a Democracy to succeed it needs an informed electorate and a vigorous free press.
For quite some time we have had neither here in America.
Had the same turnout occurred in 2010 as in 2008 when we elected Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in both houses we would not be in this dire strait.
republicans would not have been able to gerrymander half of the states into their own secure fiefdoms. We would have seen infrastructure building that would have blunted a lot of the anger we see from t rump country today.
And we would not have seen the 4th Estate retreat into the "bothsideism" that we have seen the last 10 years.
Without the extremism of F(alse)ox and right wing hate radio we would see more "truth".
So it is finally up to We the People to decide who we are and what kind of Nation we want.
And it really seems like this year that decision might destroy what is left of our National ideals; as well as the entire livable planet.
5
The Brexit vote was a screw up of epic, astounding proportions. While voters are entitled to do what they want when such a vote is called, it should never have been decided by a single round and never by a simple majority. Even small town city councils often require two votes to pass even modest legislation.
Something that took policy experts decades to craft should not have been thrown over the side so easily, propelled, also, by the short term gain of power greedy politicians.
That this essay turns on experts vs. citizens is entirely appropriate to what has been going on in the U.S. in recent years. We have had a revolt against experts that has channeled matters in unfortunate and destructive ways. With the internet at their finger tips, with outright, as opposed to subtle, propaganda flooding public debate as never before in our nation's history, suddenly everyone is an expert. Now, everyone imagines they are an expert and, worse, the only expert needed, aside from a radio talker who makes money by building anger.
This is a fundamental shift in American attitudes. A huge portion of the public now doesn't want to "get along" but rather vanquish those with other views. We can't have democracy without compromise.
2
The author's line of reason fails when he relies on academia and the press as purveyors of truth. The Press is demonstrably biased and in fact filled with reporters who lack even the basic analytical skills to determine truth. The press is paid for by the likes an dislikes and to a large degree the integrity of the press is counter to the economic structure of the reporting. A simple example is that during hurricane reporting, hyperbole overrides balanced reporting to drive traffic. Not only is the system designed this way but individual reporters "win" by virtue of size of audience (Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Madow for example).
Academia is far more rigorous in hard sciences where the subject matter is by and large non political. However, social sciences are fraught with bias and the very nature of academia, the self-reinforcing nature of faculty senates, tenure selection and lack of accountability once tenured, leads to deep left wing bias in most of academia. The bias is most easily seen when you look at social work product of far right institutions like Liberty university.
The Press and Academia need far more reform before they can be considered reliiable pillars of truth
3
@Chris "... leads to deep left wing bias in most of academia." No, what leads to "deep left wing bias in most of academia" is that academics respect facts and data and ... as Krugman likes to say ... "facts have a liberal bias."
The truth can be hidden by lies in various ways, as shown in this essay.
One method which is not usually noted has become important because of our current president.
A person can have Antisocial Personality Disorder. Such a person lies a lot, and gets away with it because of their lack of shame about the lies. Those hearing the lies just can't believe that a person could be telling a lie when they display absolutely no shame.
A person with Asperger's (high-functioning Autistic Spectrum Disorder) is unusually persistent about their interests. The lies just go on and on.
Trump has both disorders. They explain his unusually persistent and effective lies. They have created a situation where along with our political differences we have different sets of truth.
2
Reading that last paragraph, I have a bad, sinking feeling that that ship may have already sailed.
State media (Fox) has been brainwashing the ignorant masses (made ignorant by bleeding education funding dry and substituting creationism for science) and politicians have been lying with no consequences for far too long and so these aforementioned masses are no longer able to discern between truth and untruth.
2
Not only can you choose what is true, there is good money to be made by casting doubt on the truth and offering alternatives.
What to do with Trump supporters? Joe Walsh tweeted out some experience he had with Trump supporters in a line to see Trump at a rally. He reports that every one of them he talked with said Trump does not lie. He does not golf. They had no idea the deficit is growing larger faster than it did under President Obama. They think China is paying for the tariffs.
It's not enough to say we get what we deserve. America's history demands better. America deserves responsible citizens that care, it deserves citizens who will not willingly accept lies as truth, or ignorance as something to be proud of, denial instead of wisdom.
Belief does not change objective facts. Objective facts exist. Liars say differently. Liars lie.
4
I'm sure you are quite right. Running up to the civil war was a nothing like today.
Want to talk about bipartisanship?
Two items:
Mitch McConnell on Obama's day 1
Merrick Garland (moderate Republican chose to appease, not given a hearing)
Cheating much? McConnell's Senate campaign benefits from Russian subsidies of his home state industry.
To Republicans, there is nothing more evil than a Democrat, including pedophiles! Do you really want these people in charge of your children? They corrupt the teachings of Jesus (Gospels, caring for the less fortunate, avoiding hypocrisy, moneychangers in the temple, casters of first stones, etc.) to resemble the voices in their heads. This is not the Christianity I admired years ago!
Lots more, but that will do to start with.
5
This essay is an embarrassing straw man. No one ever thought elections were about determining truth. The problem is that one side is motivated to believe lies (or perhaps incapable of evaluating truth?)
The proper question to ask, then, is whether people would be allowed to utterly ignore the truth, or lie about it either as representatives of the people, or in the voting booth. I am not telling any Republican that it is not their right two make foolish choices and drown their grandchildren; I am telling them that they have to acknowledge that there is a choice to be made. I have no idea how this sort of "informedness" can be worked into a democratic system, but that is the problem, not some abstract distinction between truth and preference.
1
But...seriously...
Can we investigate Hunter Biden and the conflict of interest his father had while he was Vice President of the United States?
1
@Kimbo
But but.....seriously..... can we investigate Ivanka for getting those trademarks from China after having dinner with leader of China while her father was President of the United States?
3
@Kimbo Yes we can do that. At the same time we investigate Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner while their father/father-in-law is President of the United States. Or don't you think these people are profiting off their association with the President?
3
Trump's sleazeball defense counsel claims this should be left to the voters -albeit this involves messing with the electoral process.
Also, as a voter, I don't want to see that criminal getting tax-payer funded security personnel for his lifetime - ie, bodyguards he hides behind so that he can bully women, 4-year old children who are immigrants, teenaged advocates who understand what climate change is, etc. I don't want one penny more to go toward that ratpunk criminal posing as president getting bodyguards he can hide behind while he threatens to punch people in the face.
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell can't even be asked if they have a sense of decency or shame.
Why ask them. We already know they don't and that they're not going to even consider decency or shame.
To the Republican party senators. Shame on you. You're not just indecent, your diabolical and disgusting.
5
Seems you can choose what is true, at least in the short term. Look at all the people voting that global warming is fake.
2
@David Weintraub King Canut was told he was so mighty the tides would obey him. That was not true ... and in the pretty short term. You can choose what to *believe* but the truth has a nasty way of biting you on the nose ...
The unfortunate truth is that nobody makes millions telling people to compromise. Fox News and six hundred radio stations on the right and others on the left make bank by convincing people that their fellow Americans are their enemies. How do you compromise with a mortal enemy? You don't. Except democracy and the survival of the country depend on it. Where do we go from here? We'd better figure it out quickly.
One of the key moments in recent Venezuelan history was when the Chavista government closed down Radio Caracas TV, which was the most vocal critic of the government. Since then the media has either supported the government or been cowed into keeping their contrary opinions to themselves. The truth is no longer broadcast. Any and all government mistakes are hidden from the general public. Only favorable news to the government is aired. So that even though the government has been terrible, and has literally destroyed the country, many, too many, people continue to think that it is doing a good job. The opposition did nothing when Radio Carcas TV was closed because the owner was a rich man, ie the type of character who doesn´t elicit much sympathy from anyone else. But unfortunately his great voice was necessary to keep some kind of check on the government and its actions.
1
Thank you for an excellent analysis of our present situation. I think it should be required reading for every voter. Problem is I think the "average voter" would not have the patience or the capacity for independent thought to be able to get through your article.
4
There are certain things that cannot be faked. For example populists cannot lie to you about the levels of the stock market, though they can work behind the strings to manipulate markets. But the truth is that if stocks crash, the populists (or any other leader that seeks to winning by obscuring truth) will be the naked emperors without clothes. It is very important to note that the populism of the left (Warren, Sanders) may be just as vulnerable to emotional signaling over truth as the populists of the far right - the public would be be served safeguarding against the dangers both pose rather than assuming that the erosion of democracy can only come from the right. History says the exact opposite in most cases.
But on the other hand, the Centrists can not take that their policies working when they don't for many people. That is when the populists are the ones who uncover the truth, but asking people 'how are these policies working for you?'
3
This great essay is predicated on the notion that political actors and voters have a greater allegiance to the truth and knowledge than to their own beliefs and desires. For hardcore religionists, truth must fall within the bounds of their religion's beliefs. Try getting American evangelicals to reorder their belief system, when their current one is so good for them.
I think much of the GOP resistance to acknowledging climate change is because they think if they admit it is real, voters will desire action. So they declare its not real, and have the FOX megaphone to promote their belief. If FOX were devoted to the truth, the GOP would crumble and become a rural southern and western rump party.
I am usually a big fan of Harari's writing but I find this essay a muddle. Aren't our desires and our understanding of the truth fundamentally linked? Isn't it a fact that most folks who vote for Trump fervently believe it is true that abortion is murder or climate change doesn't exist, and see Trump as a means to promote in all of society their version of the truth? What is fundamentally missing from this analysis is an understanding of power. It's not just about truth vs. desire which is a false dichotomy, but the pursuit of truth and desire *and* the will to power that define human behavior in things like elections. The whole point of voting, honestly, is to ensure your version of the truth prevails. Isn't that why we all vote?
1
"But what happens when the government has the power to systematically manipulate the will of the people?"
This has already happened in North Korea, Israel, Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela and many other places, to varying degrees. It feels like a trend, not an aberration. Faux populists like Donald Trump are using the techniques of fascism, albeit without much violence and without the formation of a police state. Trump has already succeeded in manipulating the truth to such an extent that roughly 42% of American adults live in fantasyland. That is a scary state of affairs because we don't know how far this will go nor to what extent the guardrails of democracy will hold.
2
"We are very close to the point when some governments and corporations will know enough biology, gather enough data and command enough computing power to know us better than we know ourselves."
Are we not already living in that reality? If not, it's not that far off. Is the populist backlash a response to that feeling of impotence in the face of technologies that overwhelm our biological systems ability to choose?
"Elections are about finding compromise among people with vastly different desires."
No, they are one side IMPOSING its will on the other.
"For example, Christian fundamentalists very much desire the Scriptures to be true and the theory of evolution to be false. However, even if 90 percent of voters are Christian fundamentalists, they should not have the power to dictate scientific truth or to prevent scientists from exploring and publishing inconvenient truths."
Unfortunately, in Texas, religious fundamentalist dominate the Texas Board of Education, and they decide what will or will not be presented in textbooks, irrespective of what is scientific fact. And they would say "Irregardless of what ... "
Prof. Harari needs to get out of his ivory tower more often.
3
"...but they cannot elect whatever truth they like."
This is exactly what Trump and the Right are doing will success.
By negating and truth, Trump is able to control millions of voters.
I think Trump is like a virus, which keeps spreading, everywhere.
We fear the Coronavirus, but many welcome the virus of Trump.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope that Democrats will wake up and fight the Trump insanity.
"Democracy is coming to the USA" (Leonard Cohen)
2
Not sure if you've been keeping up on current events, but the GOP senate just determined that Trump can break any law, and employ any foreign agent, to help him steal the election.
How can we possibly depend on the election to solve our problems if the election is now admittedly fraudulent? Trump was breaking the law left and right BEFORE the Senate's acquittal, surely his election tampering will increase fifty fold. Indeed, under the Senate's rubric, he could CANCEL the election if he thought it was in the country's best interests.
All of this point to the election is a ruse. We now live in a fascist state where the President is no longer encumbered by the rule of law. The election is meaningless.
5
The Author had me until he spoke about the "independence of the Media, science and the courts. Independence is a very subjective word when assessing today's Media. I don't know when the Media became "partisan" but Partisan they are. The bulk of the Media in the United States is "Left Leaning-Progressive" and are a a guide and a tool for politicians of the Democrat Party. I don't say this lightly. I read many different flavors of Media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC and even Fox News (NOT Fox opinion though I sometimes can force myself to sit through an episode of Sean Hannity). However not only are most of these publications in lock-step with the Democrat Party but sometimes I believe they are driving the narrative (sad but true).
Even Science can be skewed if there are only opinions and not fact. Take Climate Change for instance: There is a lot of disagreement about the science of climate change versus cycles of climate change. I am not saying man has not had a role in climate change but to blame humans solely is short-sighted. More research is necessary.
I totally agree that individual opinion is not truth. It is just your truth.
1
@Rozie James If your last paragraph were the message coming out of FOX News, GOP voters could vote for their desire to lightly tap the brakes instead of accelerating into ever increasing emissions. But with FOX News blaring "hoax", people that get their news there don't know that tapping the brakes might be desirable.
@Rozie James
"I am not saying man has not had a role in climate change but to blame humans solely is short-sighted. More research is necessary."
Tell that to the polar bears that are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. I'm sure they'll find that comforting. They have all the time in the world . . .
Change the joke about the communist to a capitalist and the punchline to: "You will like having your wages compete in a free market, so they are driven down, and we get more" would be more reflective of our actual circumstances.
4
Certainly this is one way to look at popular elections: What is your desire?
But some of us look at elections and ask 'What will be better?'
IN the first case, as Harari points out, only the elector can know what his desire is and experts are pointless. But in the second case, what will be better, there is plenty of room for expert opinion and real reason to curtail the input of the stupid, ill-informed, ill intentioned or worse.
Getting down to brass tack, those of us who are interested in a better future and not solely concerned with our immediate gratification may be willing to find a way to allow immigrants into our country, may consider paying higher taxes in return for a more inclusive or equitable society and may not be willing to tolerate a president markedly unqualified for the job.
In America, there is a clash of two electorates, separate and distinct: The Fox News crowd swallowing their predigested news avidly from the beak of their preferred source and the rest of us.
The complicating factor is that the Fox news crowd holds a majoritarian hand on the throttle of our democracy solely through the actions of the electoral college and spirited partisan gerrymandering.
I don't think the situation can be resolved peacefully.
5
Did the impeachment managers just invoke Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore?
That's endemic of this political nonsense and the House's botched case. A nicely made-up narrative suiting the Democratic Party's openly hostile ambitions to take over power without the will of the people!
2
@Jamie If Trump is removed from office, Pence becomes President. That does not represent the Democrats taking power.
1
@Jamie
Results of the 2016 election:
Clinton: 65,853,514
Trump: 62,984,828
Given these facts, whining about the "will of the people" or "overturning the election" just makes you seem very, very foolish.
The electoral college already overrode what "the people" wanted and installed Trump instead. Math matters. Facts matter.
1
"Still, do you want to reach a peaceful compromise with these people, or would you rather settle your disagreements with guns and bombs?"
Depends on the nature of the compromise, doesn't it?
1
As a historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari brings the two most important subjects to bear for understanding democracy. That's why this article is disappointing.
Since democracy killed the philosopher Socrates, it has done such things as holding Japanese Americans in concentration camps, nuclear bombing innocents, creating McCarthyism and destroying careers of creative artists with its HUUAC, killing millions in its wars of aggression in Southeast Asia, and hundreds of thousands in Iraq, placing innocent people in jail for a total of over 20,000 years, etc. Since this isn't ethically acceptable, democracy isn't either.
Philosophy has advanced over time, and while Hariri's rancid arguments might have been at the leading edge in past centuries, now they are no longer state of the art.
1
"...The question “Do human actions cause the earth’s climate to warm?” is a question of truth. Lots of people wish the answer to this question to be “no,” but their desires don’t change reality."
If professor Yuval Noah Harari had any training in the sciences he would drop delusional assertions setting himself as arbiter of reality for the standard scientific approach which is testing a proposition. Prove your assertion, prof. Harari, and the Nobel Prize in Physics is yours.
News organizations should take note. But it is not likely their behavior will change, since each organization will insist it is without bias and speaks only the truth.
One commenter kind of provided evidence for my position. He sees FOX News as a problem, but if he thinks the same of CNN or MSNBC, as others would, he did not say so.
The better position from which to argue is to understand all media have problems, and the best way to counter that, is for one to consume media with leanings from both sides of the political spectrum.
Of course media should not have political leanings, but that is only aspirational.
1
You lost me at "That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights."
In the US, citizens do NOT have equal voting rights. In Congressional elections, some votes are overvalued and others are undervalued by partisan gerrymandering. In Presidential elections, the same happens through the Electoral College. And when it comes to legislating, voters is small states have disporportionate influence over our politics via the Senate.
If US citizens had equal voting rights, Donald Trump would not be President and we would have enacted gun regulations, higher income taxes on the wealthy, legislation to address climate change, and many other things.
6
What an excellent read. My only issue is towards the end when the writer speaks of “saving democracy.” Sadly, it is dead and we missed the opportunity to save it. Instead, the past few months we buried its body.
2
@Stephen We don’t have to save democracy. It’s alive and well to the degree that it exists within a Republic. If there is a problem then it’s merely that people expect too much at the national level. That’s not where true democracy exists. True democracy exists at the local level where people have the most say in what governing looks like.
"That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights."
Wrong! voter suppression is not equal on all voters. Wrong! Gerrymandering has candidates picking their constituency. not voters picking the candidate. Wrong! The electorial college allows a very particular minority more weight than a wider majority.
That is the fact of the matter.
4
There is a problem here. The experts properly determine the facts of climate change while the voters must weigh in on the response of society. If voters aren't convinced, or choose to look the other way, then the response to climate change will likely be insufficient. In short, democracy doesn't seem suitable to respond to the challenge of climate change. And that's just at a national level. The challenge on the international/global level is even greater.
1
@S Brown How to deal with climate change is indeed a choice between eliminating emissions or making changes to cope with climate change.
Democracy is a bad system. It’s just better than all of the known alternatives.
Oh but you can choose what is true.
"True" is anything that your political leaders tell you is true, and they use numerous sources to "prove" to you what is true.
It's the beauty of today's world. No one ever has to fear being wrong.
1
Not one of Harari's better efforts, particularly the first half, he seemed to be endorsing emotion over informed reason as the proper focus of decision making. I got the impression that he had just finished a 3-month meditation retreat--too detached and fatalistic. The last half was better--should have led with that.
1
Voters don’t usually have an opportunity to pass laws. Voters don’t usually have the opportunity to vote on policy preferences.
Voters primarily vote for parties and candidates. The limited power of many individual votes can then get magnified into the winner’s power to make decisions about government policy.
Harari might believe that elected officials should respect independent institutions, but he doesn’t really address them. Instead, he holds individual voters accountable for voting not just their preferences but also based on whether their preferred candidate shows sufficient deference to democratic institutions. Unfortunately, Harari also denies that voters’ preferences are subject to rational revision even in the face of the manifest truth — let alone hard-to-discern facts about candidates’ willingness to respect independent institutions.
In the end, Harari is left with a very minimal point, i.e. that he has a desire for elected officials to show deference to democratic institutions. But that’s just his desire. And, in a democracy, no one’s desires should have more influence than anyone else’s.
2
@Adam The opinion piece spelled out why voters don’t vote on individual pieces of legislation. You vote your preference and then those representatives have hearings and make their more informed vote on that legislation.
Prof Harari is a great writer. I have enjoyed his books and this article. I disagree with one sentence in this article, and I hope that he will respond to it. He writes in this article that:
"That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights."
But due to our archaic electoral college system, as two-senator pnr state rule, all citizens do not have equal voting rights. Citizens of less populated states have voting rights that count more than the voting rights of citizens of more populated states.
What suggestions does Prof. Harari have for this anomaly?
7
@AR The Presidency and senate were never intended to be democratic institutions. They are intended to balance out the ill effects of democracy. You are voting for your senators and electors, not as a fractional of a non-existent national vote. Everyone essentially has the same vote for House of Representatives and that is the Democratic institution of the national government.
2
A political party that tries to remove a duly elected President because they dislike his policies and detest him is dishonest. We have elections so people can make their own choices not a political party. If we continue going down this path, we will never have fair elections.
2
I assume you are talking about Bill Clinton’s impeachment since what he did had no national security implications or was a manipulation of policy to benefit himself.
I too have been worried about the path the Republican Party has been trying to take us down for a long time.
7
@KMW Correct. On the other hand, a political party that refuses to remove a duly elected President who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors fails its duty to defend and protect the Constitution. After all, being elected President does not confer carte blanche to commit impeachable acts.
3
As it is, our elections are not fair, and with the Senate acquitting Trump it’s virtually guaranteed that he will cheat his way to victory in November. After that, if we even have elections at all, they will be purely for show. In 2024 we may well have only the option of either voting for Donald Jr. or not, with people who vote no likely suffering consequences such as losing their jobs or being harassed by the police.
Nobody really wants to face up to reality, including me, but the sad reality is that our democracy died in November of 2016. Even if we manage to elect another Democratas President, the courts will do a 180 and “discover” all kinds of limits on executive power.
1
My dear Noah, it gets even more complicated when others see "truth" differently than you. I hope this article helps you cope as you go thru your stages of death and dying. After reviewing the facts presented I, as a 40 year Gay Democrat don't believe that the President acted in a manner to warrant Impeachment. Additionally, even noted Economist have different opinions of how Brexit will affect GDP, although for me that is the highest priority, but as you said others may have different priorities. Not getting what you want I know is a challenge for many younger folks who were socialized that they can always get what you want. Learning otherwise is a lesson in growing up.
3
No country, no matter what it professes, can be a democracy if the majority on its highest court make the Citizens United decision. That distorted the very 1st Amendment the court pretends to respect, by equating corporate mega donor money in elections with 'Free Speech'.
This effectively muffles the voice of the citizen 99 percent, who can't compete, and amplifies the influence of the 1 percent.
Our biggest election expense is campaign advertising on our media, needing wealthy donor money to finance. Our media, so proud of the free speech, makes big profit from campaign ads.
Wikipedia says many countries actually ban those privately paid ads, so their political discourse won't be dominated by 'special interests'----per Wikipedia. Guess their media does without that profit.
Here, these ads are allowed to dominate, and their paid media messages swamp our voters.
Compare/contrast the ripple effects of both policies.
6
On a certain level, I agree with this author. But although Trump has lost contact with the truth, so have Democrats.
Let's take global warming, which is arguably the central political issue of our age.
Trump denies global warming altogether. This is ridiculous. There are maps of sea ice in the arctic year after year showing a steady retreat. Scientists who study warming deserve our respect. Their best estimates are that temperatures world-wide will increase by an average of 3.7 to 4.8 degrees C from preindustrial levels by 2100. That will have huge effects, and much of the tropics on planet earth will gradually become uninhabitable.
But Democrats are also in denial. They often deny that climate change is caused by population growth in spite of overwhelming evidence. Population of planet earth has doubled since 1972. And that means increased usage of fossil fuels.
The author might say: We can CHOOSE to ignore the impact of population growth on quality of life. We can PREFER congestion.
And indeed, most people continue to believe that continued population growth is OK, or that it is inevitable. Their false beliefs set us on a path of future hardship for mankind.
Thus while Democrats CLAIM it is racist to EVEN DISCUSS the impact of population growth on survivability for humans on planet earth, their reasoning is backwards.
After all, it is Africa which is slated to double in population by 2050. Wouldn't it be racist to ignore the future suffering of Africans?
4
@Blaise Descartes your comparison is disingenuous. If some people in this country refuse to accept climate change, how are you going to sell them that they can't reproduce either?
Be serious, people in general don't want to give up their cars, their meat, their air travel. If you as a Democratic politician ask them to not have kids, you are a political pariah.
Your argument fails to accept that in the continuum of acceptance vs. denial, Democrats are in acceptance and more ready to act. The truth (as Harari says) is, however, that most people don't want to give away their convenience and comfort. Only other peoples'
@Blaise Descartes You have written what is currently forbidden to state: that world population cannot continue to geometrically increase without inevitably destroying the means to sustain humans on the planet. Paul Erlich published "The Population Bomb" in 1968, and many today bray about how wrong he was to say we'd be unable to feed the world by 2000. In truth, he was wrong about the time frame, not the truth of the futility of unending population growth. Check out the current locust plague in Kenya, which threatens to wipe out this year's agricultural production. At the current rate of increase, as you say, Africa will be a disaster area in the next half century. Like the locust, massive populations of humans will seek to survive by any means and humanity worldwide will face a very dark future if this problem not recognized in the next decade.
Interesting comment. But if you meant to show that population growth is the cause of global warming then you ought to remove the phrase “which leads to more fossil fuels”. Higher population does not empirically need to lead to the use of fossil fuels. It only does so because the fossil fuel industry controls all energy decisions made by our federal government. And national governments of many nations. Why? Cold hard easy flowing immediate cash. The meek may inherit the earth, but only after the rich have destroyed it.
2
The world is an increasingly complex and fast-changing place. Even many quantitative or statistical arguments presented in political contexts are full of wild distortions that go unstated and then get defended with nonsense when exposed.
The result is often denial of a problem or the promotion of obviously ineffective solutions that siphon off money and votes but accomplish little else. Perhaps the most glaring example is climate change denial vs. the silliness of purely lithium battery-powered cars or high-speed rail as meaningful remedies in the present-day USA. One has to wonder if the "Hummer EV" is a real product or an attempt to make people realize how absurd it is to think of something like a Tesla as "green" for most drivers.
So yes, voting is about desires, but the system breaks down when the truth is suppressed or drowned out by propaganda. The promotion of truth and individual liberty will likely be a winning political strategy until both parties thoroughly embrace it.
1
Excellent essay, but I disagree with your subtitle. The legislative process is where elected representatives should seek compromise. Individual voters, I would argue, should be uncompromising and use their votes to express their desires.
Our situation now is that we have two conflicting and contradictory realities and truths, and one reality's truth is the other's fake news. We had such a split about how the Vietnam War was going, and both sides were unwilling to accept the other side's reality. What we did not do after the war was to study the history of the war and figure out how it happened that we developed two realities, how we could have avoided this, and how we could avoid something similar in the future.
Since we did not do this, it happened to us again in Iraq. Rummy remained sunny about the war's progress until the alternate realty got him canned.
Now the gap between two realities is complete and exists across all areas of society and politics. Our political system was not designed to deal with such a gap, and the last time it arose we dealt with the problem (slavery) with a war and a postwar reconstruction. But the division of realities remained and the white Southern reality ultimately won as reconstruction was abandoned.
We will have gridlock until our two-reality problem resolves itself by the victory of one side, and if the gridlock and struggle go on without a victory our country will decay and degrade and be pushed aside by other countries.
A democracy is a fragile organism; most die in infancy.
As a species, what we accept as truth is a strong function of repetition: the more often we hear a claim, the more likely we are to believe it. And once a claim is believed, selection bias enshrines it as truth.
A stable democracy constantly requires that all members of the electorate re-evaluate their beliefs, otherwise compromise is not possible. We don't seem to be at this point yet in our intellectual evolution. Perhaps we briefly flirted with this ability, during the post-war boom economy and the common bond temporarily forged by the need to protect ourselves from a powerful enemy. But when the steady paycheck disappeared and that enemy crumbled, so did our ability to compromise.
Mr. Harari is correct, but I fear that his logic is wasted on the America of 2020.
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"vastly different desires".
yes. some want to work.
some want handouts.
some want to pay back our student loans as best we can.
some want to be bailed out with free money from others.
Some politicians want to buy votes with hand outs. Some want to scare you with false statistics about income disparity. The lower rungs of income have seen rapid wage growth. Look at the statistics, do your own homework. Don't let others cherry pick data and spin.
Some politicians want to punish success, and steal from the rich. Stealing is wrong; we learned that in kindergarten. Even, from rich folks.
Some politicians want to keep you down to keep you dependent on hand outs.
1
@Yes to progress You might want to examine these ideas carefully and see if there are good facts to back them up. Are there really a lot of people who "want to be bailed out with free money from others"? Have the lower classes really seen rapid wage growth recently? Is the imposition of graduated taxes really "stealing from the rich"? The latter statement reflects a belief, but you'll have to agree that others have quite different beliefs. Ask real questions, and keep an open mind.
2
False statistics about income disparity? USA is by far the worst in the world on this metric.
1
The key fallacy of this essay is the assumption that an objective truth exists. "Truth," unfortunately, varies from country to country, and from era to era. In the end, the underlying "truths" of a nation or a people are what drive their desires; the "truth" and the desire are symbiotic.
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@Harry
Wrong. There is an underlying truth and an underlying reality to everything. Science is about discovering that truth, which is often elusive and our comprehension of that truth can evolve over time. But the truth does not change.
Your view that truth changes and can be whatever you desire it to be is exactly why society generally, and the US in particular, faces such challenging times.
7
@Bill White
You are awfully sure about your assertion that 'truth does not change'. The thing is, 'truth' is like all other aspects of what we perceive as reality, subjective. How can it be otherwise ?
Even science, with its ever-more-precise devices for investigating the cosmos, is limited by how those devices are designed and who interprets the results.
Science itself has recognized that 'truth' is variable. Exploration of the quantum realm has shown that uncertainty prevails until the 'quantum field' is collapsed. The field collapses when it is observed. And observation is by definition subject to the perspective of
the observer.
I didn't find a good description of what this author considers to be 'truth' in his article.
@Bill White Sorry, Bill, but truth changes over time as more understanding is gained of reality. As a science proponent, you should know this.
Consequently, what a people or nation knows as "true" today is what they will use as the presuppositions for their decisions,. As the paradigms shift, the "truth" will change with it, and so will the people.
All these things are true, but in our (US) political system, the majority does not always "rule". If this system, which allows for a lot of discrimination continues and continues to result in continuous minority rule, the population eventually will become so polarized, that political violence will ensue. Hopefully I will not be around for that.
3
@Amos This is why there are so many levels of government. The majority of governing should take place at a local or state level. These are the most democratic levels of government. National government is intended to be more limited in its impact on day to day governing and was only intended to be democratic at the House of Representatives level.
Harari assumes -- without argument -- that the content of basic desires is not subject to rational evaluation. That is to say, he assumes that Hume was obviously right and Aristotle was just obviously wrong. But now consider the deisire of the white natinoalist to live in a racially pure ethno-state. That very desire -- not the actions he might take to bring it about -- seems to me to be properly subject to rational criticism. To borrow from Augustine: call no nation happy if it gets what it wants; only if it wants what it should.
3
In your book Sapiens you write of the eventual demise of the human race. Our myth making capacity may be the very engine that leads to our extinction.
1
@Paul Bonner: Agreed. We're much more likely to believe an emotionally compelling story than actual evidence and logic. That's been the downfall of most civilizations.
It's just hard to bear witness to our current and rapid demise.
1
This author is only telling half the story. He describes the way our other systems of civilization can reorient and restore government, how “truth” can inform “desire,” but he fatally neglects the reality that government can transform, cripple, or destroy those institutions just as easily, in implicit and explicit ways.
This is most obvious when he describes our judicial system separately from our government. Sure, we’d love to believe that justice can be truthfully served to governmental bodies in every case (that’s not saying anything newer than what’s in any democratic constitution). But to argue that point in the world we live in today, is beyond idealistic, foolish, and farcical.
This author uses threadbare logic to make an obscure point that, in my estimation, sums to a puffy, faux-philosophical reminder that, “despite all evidence to the contrary, truth will win out.”
Remind me to cross “Sapiens” off my to-read list.
2
@Joshua: I read 'Sapiens.' It reminded me why I've come to dislike the genre of speculative nonfiction: entertaining stories, but not a lot of evidence.
I disagree...Dawkins was essentially correct and his analogy equally apt for America. Sure, people are entitled to what they want, but if you lack all understanding of the issues and what solutions might lead to a better life and a better country, it's kind of futile giving you the vote.
3
Compromise is a cute relic of 90's era neocons and neolibs. Newt Gingrich broke the system and any attempt to compromise with a Republican party that refuses to abide by any rules is foolish. This essay reads like a 'shut up and vote for the centrist' propaganda piece.
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All democratic countries have differences. But do they have a firm standard of rights that protects all citizens? How much are their differences allowed to interfere with basic rights, as defined in the 20th/21st Century ? Are their rights based on economic levels, racial, ethnic or gender group?
Some blockages to US democracy now:
The big difference in views on what rights all citizens are entitled to.
What the elected govt's responsibility is to the people that elect it.
What are our standards of Representation for Our Taxation.
What kind of democracy is it, when citizens and lawmakers disagree even on such a basic matter as whether all citizens should have health care as a right, no matter ability to pay? Where health care is a high profit industry, and this is equated with American 'Freedom' from Big Govt interference in profits?
In many world democracies this was decided generations ago in favor of all citizens, with profit as lower priority. Fair, adequate taxes for HC are seen in the perspective of a life and death matter, where for lack of affordable care, some people can die earlier, or become disabled, or families can be ruined financially, with effects on to the next generations.
Political differences abroad to not interfere with basic health care, even by rw parties. So that is the flashing warning light for America, once a model for other nations, that our democracy is not operating, despite our constant rhetoric.
2
The modern GOP outlawed "compromise" a long time ago. Just as it has enshrined "propaganda" as the truth, and extortion as "perfectly legal".
The upcoming election will not decide whether or not the Democrats or Republicans win as much as it will decide whether or not this country will live in reality or some nightmarish fantasy land of lies and conspiracy theories.
For example, it will decide whether or not the need for a viable planet is merely a "hoax".
4
"In the media, free competition means that if one newspaper avoids publishing a scandal, its competitor is likely to jump at the scoop."
Mr. Harari, a flaw that I see is that it is the check you have defined is based on competition. But the metric for "competition" is viewers, and it appears sensationalism and appeals to emotion lead the drive to viewers. In my opinion this check seems to encourage the opposite of your thesis.
A similar critique could be made within the court system. In the advent of the Federalist Society it appears that the correcting factor, and competition drive is to encourage dogmatism and activist revisionism.
3
The GOP of the Senate are trying to say it should be up to the people to decide if Trump should stay in office.
In other words they are neglecting their duty as outlined in the Constitution.
Not only should Trump be thrown out of office but every Republican member of the Senate should be as well.
1
@BTO The constitution allows for impeachment. It does not require it. Just as voting is a matter of desire vs truth, allow vs require is a serious difference.
1
@John , You should try reading the US Constitution , Article 1, Sections 12 & 13.
They have a duty.
The author makes an intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable argument. Sadly, the problem revealed by the facts is not mentioned. It is a likely fact (believed by many experts, and consistent with history) that a democracy cannot survive without democracy being the consensus government of those governed. When the facts are on the table, 46% of Americans said John Donald Trump is doing a good job as President.
That means they (almost half) of the citizens do not understand that the US Constitution is the defining document of the US democratic republic, or that there is not a consensus among the citizens that democracy is the preferred form of government, or both. Democracy in the U.S., as defined in the Constitution. therefore is dead. We were not able to keep it.
@riverrunner By this rational most nations don’t have a democracy. Many have parliaments and multiple parties that don’t represent a majority of voters. The election in the UK was a landslide even though only 46% of voters selected a conservative MP. President Clinton was elected with less than 50% of the vote.
1
I seriously hope the Democratic Party will forever abandon their pitch as the "Party of Inclusiveness".
After all, the only leading candidates they can offer up are elderly white people.
Dems, you have no credibility.
1
"We can choose what we want, but we shouldn’t deny the true meaning of our choice." This sums up the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Republican leaders. Will the moderate Republican voters save us, please.
A great piece of writing with insight and clarify. Unfortunately, however, unlike in physical sciences where truth is independent, human history is written by human activities guided by their desires -- desires can form reality.
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@ll Many climate scientists state that if all carbon emission stopped today (a virtual impossibility) global warming would proceed unhindered. Like trying to stop a downbound train with a feather what humans have unleashed is way too far gone to stop now.
Winner-take-all elections are manifestly not about reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people. There’s not even a compromise!
This an idealistic theory of the governing practices of democratic societies. But elections are about wielding power in order to tilt the balance in favor of one’s preferences. They are as close as democratic governments usually get to giving up the pretense of seeking a reasonable compromise between the conflicting desires of their citizens.
1
I would add a third method for protecting the truth. Have education at all levels strongly emphasize how to evaluate proposed “truths” using evidence. That ability seems to have evaporated from American life. People see something they wish to believe and seem to have no idea how to vet it, or even of the importance of trying.
You wouldn’t think that habit of mind is something that needs to be taught, but our current politics clearly shows that it is. Perhaps it is the mushy logic of advertising that has confused us, making non-arguments seem like enough to persuade. Or maybe wishful thinking is just the most comforting tool in daunting times. Or maybe believing in something is just easier than finding something to know.
Whatever the cause, the solution can be taught.
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@DC I have been calling this "habit of mind" critical thinking. It seems to have gradually disappeared from our institutions of public education, and I don't think it's by accident. Since at least President Reagan I fear the Republicans have strived to de-fund public education (in favor of private and religious education) so that voters would lack the skills of critical thinking and be easier to dupe. I believe they have now achieved their goals.
2
There’s a logical flaw here. The writer said election results are rightly based on desire, but the actions of elected representatives must follow scientific truth, if I read this correctly.
But if the desire of voters is to elect people who do not respect scientific truth, then this plan is obviously self-contradictory.
Required immunizations for public school attendance is a perfect example of this.
1
@We the Purple I think you're mostly right. His point is people vote on their desire. However, he also suggests that there be a pursuit and public distribution of what is true -- the pros and cons. What some people vote for is based on lies or half truths. It's that problem that institutions are supposed to protect against. But i don't see that working here in the USA right now. Our institutions allowed themselves to be pushed around for too long, believing that truth will win out. It hasn't.
2
Harare does not say so but he is writing about the Trump impeachment trial. He is basically saying that the Republican senators’ strongest defense of their behavior, that it is so close to an election that we ought to let the people decide about Trump, is totally bogus. We can vote for Trump. But that vote tells us nothing about whether or not he has abused his power and should therefore be removed from office. The senate trial, like any trial, is intended to search for the truth. Senators cannot discharge their responsibility to look for the truth by appealing to the will of the people. The will of the people can not make Trump innocent and it can’t make him guilty. Unfortunately, given the un-democratic way in which we elect our presidents, it can’t even keep him from being re-elected.
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Well ... Red America can't handle truth ... or facts.
So, it refuses evidence (or testimony) so it doesn't have to bump into truth/facts that are inconvenient.
2
When people imply that a prophets words or an ancient biblical text are factual and take precedence over constitutionally granted rights and liberties we being set backward significantly. The values of the Enlightenment era were hard won over centuries of bloody medieval primitiveness. Get real.
5
“I assumed like everybody else, way back when everyone was talking about global warming and all that, I assumed that that was probably right, until I found out what it was going to cost.”
- Sen. James Inhofe
(R) Oklahoma
“Trump, and Mark Zuckerberg, are the two blades of a pair of scissors that is cutting the fabric of truth to ribbons.“
— Bernard Henri-Levi
French philosopher
“We love our poorly educated.”
- Donald Trump, Las Vegas, 2016
Personal affinity to truth and ethics, and dare I say benevolence, is the only thing that will save the quality of our lives going forward. These should be the foundation blocks of desire.
3
The center of the problem of the real world is the potential conflict between the individual preferences and desires and those of the rest of the people. Selfish voters would tend to avoid respecting the other's rights, while voters who respect the other's rights and preferences would take seriously their rights. I guess that in the second case democratic voting is a good way to make decisions. However, if the selfish are majority I am reluctant to accept taking voting decisions with relatively small (say less than 10%) margins.
I guess that the "benevolent dictator" would be a better decision maker in the latter case.
1
@berale8 This is why we live in a Republic and not an actual democracy. Our rights are enshrined in a constitution that requires a great deal more than a simple majority to undo.
@John Are you suggesting that the US is not a a democratic Republic? Only a Constitutional Republic?
The author makes a number of good points but for half the country or more, the concepts will go in one ear and out the other.
The hardest disease of all to cure is ignorance. No one's done it world wide since the dawn of time. It takes self effort and a desire to actually learn facts and details.
Most in the US, especially GOP voters, want others like Fox news to do their thinking and "research" for them. Truly scary.
Until enough individuals actually want the truth, the facts and are willing to dig for them...nothing will change.
Corporations control the megaphones that spew the GOP garbage, and the unthinking buy it for emotional or cultural reasons. Clearly they don't buy it based on actual knowledge.
Forget about envi regulations, but cut taxes to near zero & you get the trickle down scam (yet unfunded schools, rotting infrastructure, pollution and climate change... no problem), and we've got cheaper better healthcare for you ... the examples of course are endless.
So, all any of us can do is be as discerning as we can and vote for who we think will possibly do the right thing for average citizens.
Beyond that, what can most of us do.
Pray maybe, but countless trillions of prayers over ages haven't changed human character. The great mystery no doubt.
Hope for massive voter turnout - it seems all we can do.
1
We need Andrew Yang to help unite the country. He is non-ideological, is bringing disaffected voters into the political process, and is championing important democracy reforms. We need ranked choice voting so that people can safely vote for who they believe in, and have their vote transfer to their second or third choice if the others are not viable, so that the winner is the one with the broadest possible support. We also need Democracy Dollars, 100$ a year to all voters that can only be spent on political campaigns, to wash out the influence of special interests, and engage people more deeply in the political process.
2
People will argue over everything. I couldn't keep reading this article (to be honest). People can and do argue over whether the truth is true or not. Truth is only true if everybody agrees with it.
I wonder if this article ended up saying that.
1
@Robert McKee
For a philosopher, he skated on the topic of 'truth'.
Unfortunately, a lot of Trump supporters ARE "choosing what is true".
Because they think their political opponents are all engaged in a vast conspiracy to destroy "the only politician who tells it like it is", they are choosing an invented reality over the actual one.
But the end result won't benefit them. "Actual reality" will eventually be forced upon them in the form of a corporate oligarchy that is being consolidated by the Republican Party.
But they won't know this until its too late, given their "choice of what is true".
4
Excellent essay. But I don’t see in here a solution to the problem of Fox News. How does a democracy recover from the rise of a powerful media outlet which distorts the truth so consistently and helps elect corrupt politicians who benefit from this distortion and who seek to further erode democracy? What is the corrective?
372
@David Grinspoon
When a powerful media outlet distorts the truth and gets the majority of people to believe a lie, democracy suffers. When truth catches up to the lie, it could well mean a great deal of suffering and confusion. And maybe collapse. I'm afraid this is where we're headed. We may take the earth down with us.
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@David Grinspoon
Yuval did address this by pointing out that the institutions that are there to seek the truth must check one another.
This article is obviously meant as a framework. If you need concrete solutions, think of one and share it.
MSBC was one possible consequence of FOX News.
Another idea is give up Facebook, if you use it. Use an honest social media site and invite your friends to join. Without the disinformation of Facebook supporting FOX's disinformation, people will have a check on FOX via social media, which has many more users than FOX has watchers.
25
@Jared
Some diversity. Truth versus lies.
30
There are three aspects of the modern media which have fostered the rise of untruth in this country. First, they often uncritically accept the "information" they are fed from the government. Their acceptance of the government's claims about the reasons for the Iraq equation is a recent example. The media should practice telling truth to power, taking a generally skeptical if not antagonistic attitude to government claims. Second the media have practiced bothsiderism, simply repeating the claims of the sides to an issue without judgement, although if some side does not have much political or economic power it can be ignored. This is a huge advantage to whoever chooses to be untruthful. Third, the most attention is given to whoever provides the most controversy or entertainment, regardless of truth. Having "independent" media is not enough; they have to actively seek and promote truth.
111
@skeptonomist - I heartily agree. As an example of the third point, in 2009, I wrote directly to a number of Times' reporters complaining about the lack of coverage on single payer healthcare. One of them, Kevin Sack, replied to me, "Single payer is not news." When I pointed out that in the past, the Times' had made news which had a beneficial result such as their great series on workplace conditions, I did not get a reply.
19
@skeptonomist agree 100%.
8
@skeptonomist
The NYT and other Establishment media are very biased in their world reporting, as in promoting the CIA lies and the Iraq War, and their relentless promotion of anit-Russia hysteria.
Their political coverage is often equally biased.
An example of reporting on Sanders:
A 2016 Harper's article by Thomas Franks, after having meticulously examined Washington Post reporting on Bernie Sanders. "As we shall see, for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed."
..."Think of all the grand ideas that flicker in the background of the Sanders-denouncing stories I have just recounted. There is the admiration for consensus, the worship of pragmatism and bipartisanship, the contempt for populist outcry, the repeated equating of dissent with partisan disloyalty."
2
Relativism is how we got in this trouble in the first place. Facing problems means that leaders tell it like it is not wait for the stupid people in the room to get it: they won't. A good leader looks them in the eye and calmly says, follow me, you'll see. For the loud, boisterous, ignorant-but-know-it-all types: as a leader, your tell them to be quiet and let others talk.
A leader is what we need: not some other clown telling us it's okay while he cuts his selfish deal. Leaders are different for different people. But, he/she is not wishy-washy as you assume.
I will tell you what is true. The Big Mack president has overstayed his acceptance and past due date. We can smell the decay.
2
Elections are not about Truth, rather about Lies strewn by an Elite to their gullible inferiors. See Gilens and Page again.
"That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights." With such declaratives the essay offers holes large enough to drive through with whole truckloads of garbage.
Awaiting Steve Bannon's Comment here…
Since elections are a method for reaching a compromise about our desires, in the polling stations people aren’t asked “What is the truth?” They are asked “What do you want?”
Yes, we elect candidates who support off values (or lack thereof) BUT, without TRUTH we rarely get what we vote for. For instance, this feckless Trump administration began with "of course I'll release myth returns, when "the audit" is over" - LIE. "I will make America GREAT again" - LIE - it WAS great before Trump destroyed it before our and the world's eyes. "I will make Mexico pay for a WALL" - LIE - American taxpayers, and our military, are paying through the nose for a narcissistic monument we do not need. "I will make the economy GREAT" - LIE - we continue on Obama's upward path BUT we are now over $1.5 TRILLION further in debt because of a tax gift to corporations and the rich.
STUPID AMERICANS. You MUST choose TRUTH or you will not get what you are being sold. I'm sure Trump has many bridges that he will sell you really cheap too. One mistake, as terrible as it has been, is understandable, but TWICE is unforgivable.
YOU HAVE A CHNCE TO CORRECT THIS IN NOVEMBER - ANY Democrat is so much better than the crook in OUR White House.
4
As has been noted elsewhere, everyone is entitled to my own opinion. Implicit in Yuval's fine essay is the basic truth that many people are stupid and so are their opinions, but in a democracy we can not pass laws denying their stupidity. This is the beauty-and-the-beast of democracy, and it was the great frustration many felt on the morning after DJT was elected president. Still, we made the decision without guns and bombs.
1
"In a democracy voters are perfectly entitled to prefer nationalist sentiments and religious ideals over economic interests."
And I can't help but recalling the oft-touted (by Brexiteers) 350 million pounds per week that the UK was supposedly sending to the EU. It was a figure painted across the sides of a big red bus.
And of course, it was a bald-faced lie.
This is what's wrong with Harari's analysis.
How can any electorate reach "peaceful compromise" when lies supply the currency of the election?
And the lies from one side have grown increasingly more shameless and unchecked over the years.
Just from the 21st century alone:
Iraqi WMDs
John Kerry's swift boating
Obama's birthplace
Benghazi
Clinton emails
And then Trump.
Again, how to reach peaceful compromise between voters that unreservedly believe and promulgate lies and voters that seek to understand the truth? This is not just a difference of world views - nationalism vs internationalism - it's a choice between mud and a mountain stream.
4
Mr. Harari is about 30 years late with this essay. In the interim, a long parade of right-wing groups and politicians have essentially run under the slogan "we'll make true what you want." In other words, turning desire into truth. Don't like foreigners? Build a wall. Uppity women make you uncomfortable? Let's restrict their reproductive and other civil rights? Nostalgic for a whiter country? Let's make sure it stays that way!
This is precisely the point we find ourselves at today. In the early 1930s, plenty of Germans voted the National Socialist Party into parliament, and soon Hitler was vice-chancellor. These voters voted their desires: stop social disorder, get rid of troublemakers, get rid of Jews, Slavs and others who some Germans blamed for their loss of national pride and economic strength after WWI. Yes, they had to ignore the truth -- Jews and Slavs are not inferior, left-wing workers were not responsible for Germany's predicament -- but it was exactly elevating their desires that enabled them to ignore these truths.
I think Harari has made a useful distinction, but I don't see how to apply it to solve our current dilemma. To the extent that there are overlapping desires from both sides in the US, great, let's talk about that. But someone has to change what they want, or make those desires secondary to social peace, or just accept that they won't get what they want. And that's where we are stuck.
3
Listening to Ken Starr's ridiculous closing argument. He's recalling a defense attorney he worked for who told him the secret to success was truthfulness. He had the nerve to cite Dr. M.L. King. Nauseating to hear him talk about truth after hearing Trump's 16,000+ lies and the many lies told by his impeachment defense team. There has never been a more pompous sanctimonious hypocrite than Starr. I wish one of the senators would cite Starr's cover-up of widespread rape at Baylor.
3
I wonder what Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Ralph Nader think of Harrari's concluding bromide.
1
"You might find yourself sharing a country with people who you consider ignorant, stupid and even malicious — and they might think exactly the same of you. Still, do you want to reach a peaceful compromise with these people, or would you rather settle your disagreements with guns and bombs?"
Given how I feel about the GOP these days, this is a timely statement.
1
You are so right, Prof. Harari. Elections are not about truth, not when you have an incumbent president who is a pathological liar, abetted by a Fox propaganda machine that spews out a constant stream of disinformation, a tame Duma of Republican Senators who rubber-stamp his most egregious untruths and social media platforms awash in fake news.
92
I read the Breitbart News Mondays through Fridays to find out what they are thinking about. I used to laugh but now I cry. https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/02/03/graham-impeachment-when-democrats-lose-control-congress/
1
Why does everything written by Harari seem true but trite?
1
Truth has become a red herring.
1
No, elections aren't about truth. Tell that to the democrats.
1
"...if 51% of voters pass a law barring the 49% from participating in future elections, some independent referee should call "foul" and strike down the law."
Such as gerrymandering in North Carolina and voter suppression in Georgia or the celebrated case of the President smearing his most likely opponent in the fall? These methods are actually more effective than "barring the other 49%". Because how do you know who the 49% are?they are? It's a secret ballot.
Republicans are currently actually trying to literally buy African-American votes by giving away $1,000 to voters at inner city pro Trump rallies. One black Democrat suggested that blacks who get this money should vote against him anyway. Sounds good to me.
3
Most self contradictory article written by a wise man. According to this article, you do not leaders in a democratic society, to guide the society. Rather have a person to satisfy their ego and relinquish their duties to the society, and let it self destruct itself.
Maybe you should read the piece a second time.
If voters’ choice in an election should be based on "desire," it would pit emotion against rationality.
As “elections are about desire rather than truth,” voters can easily fall prey to manipulation and propaganda, as Brexit and Russian meddling in th 2016 election that helped elect Trump, showed.
“Government represents the will of the majority of the people, but the truth should not be subordinated to the will of the people.” We have been seeing "truth" being the pawn in both sides’ game. Although laws don’t change reality nor facts on the ground, unfortunately many people don’t care about the one or the other.
“To safeguard the future of democracy, we must keep truth independent of desire. It is not enough to declare loyalty to the abstract ideal of truth. The key is institutions,” and they need to be protected, despite impections, because they help “preserve democracy.”
It’s a message for Americans in Novmeber – “vote for politicians who respect the institutions that investigate and publish the truth. Vote for a party that tells people that they have the right to elect whatever government they like, but they cannot elect whatever truth they like.”
But would they heed this advice?
2
"You can't handle the truth." I can see De Toqueville is not a consideration.
With FoxNews fueling propaganda, there is no compromise because the other side is living in a different reality.
2
"Since elections are a method for reaching a compromise about our desires, in the polling stations people aren’t asked “What is the truth?” They are asked “What do you want?” That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights. When searching for the truth, the opinions of different people carry different weights. But when it comes to desire, everybody should be treated the same."
But all citizens do not have equal voting rights in the United States. First there is the joke of the Electoral College that discounts that proposition very heavily. Then you have the ridiculous rule that Wyoming which has 1 representative in the house has 2 senators, the same as California with a population roughly 75 times than the former. And Kentucky has a senator that pretty much determines who lives and who dies (literally if you think about the Garland not appointed and Gorsuch getting the seat) even though he represents only 4.5 Million people out of a population of 330 Million.
I also have a problem with your choice of the word "desire." Anyone might have a desire including harming others or even oneself. What does it exactly mean to treat everyone the same with respect to their desire, then?
I enjoyed your three books. You write well. Although, when it comes to political philosophy, I think you have to do more homework. The joke of the "strawberries and cream" is tired Cold War propaganda. One can easily invert it to a capitalist setting. I can send it to you if you want.
2
For someone as intelligent as Mr. Harari (whose books while being somewhat of an incredible slog at times... are nevertheless quite powerful), this article represents a complete cop out. I actually had to stop reading halfway because the whole idea that you hold a finger in the wind and take the vote of the entire nation to make momentous decisions is ludicrous.
Why dont we ask the people to vote on the annual budget?Afterall its their money being spent! Why dont we take a vote before making any military decisions? Afterall its their sons and daughters on the firing line... not some bureaucrat that makes these decisions?
We dont have to go out of our way to defend stupidity and ignorance. I am from India, and while India is technically a democratic country, how valid is that democracy when 70% of the voting population is illiterate or more worried about getting food in the belly than picking a leader who they could care two hoots about!
Lets call this what it is - an apologist explanation for the current state of affairs.
I want to find a candidate who does not force the WOKE hypocritical scripture down my throat. If you happened to watch the SuperBowl last night you would have seen 2 women during the halftime show put on a strip tease complete with the strip pole front and center. Yes it's true look it up. Where was the "MeToo" movement for this? I though Democrats hated the idea of objectifying women. Maybe it's just when that can be used as ammo against a Republican. I did see a lot of Liberal Hollywood folks in the stands last night.
1
@RS
And both the NYT and WaPo gave the show rave reviews.
In brief, don't vote for Republicans.
2
The problem is, people thank institutions that people set up to ask people to behave, by punching them in the face.
Harari’s word salad does nothing to move us to a better place. Human desire is an awful basis for elections because desire can easily be manipulated by those with money and power. A far better argument can be made on the basis of cybernetics. Truth is that which maintains or increases system integrity. Independent desires, when not sublimated to systemic integrity, are major sources of collapse (see Jared Diamond). Ignorant voters, brainwashed by prelates, politicians, and Faux News, will consistently vote for the platform that best serves the elite and sends them deeper into servitude. Democracy simply cannot survive where money buys elections...Period.
3
@Daniel Lake
You are just putting the definition of truth into the service of 'system integrity'. A system can be integral and maintained by the 'truth' for many centuries (e.g. male dominance in the political sphere) without having integrity for the rest of the members of that system.
Now we have to define 'system' and 'integrity' . . . .
In politics and many other things, the truth is irrelevant. Trump's biggest promise was to build a wall along the entire border. Instead, he's building a few miles of fence, far less than Obama and way, way less than Bush. But, so what?
NASA has a video showing how they'll get to the moon by 2024. No one believes they will meet this deadline, including no one at NASA. But they put a lot of work into the video, which is Soviet-style propaganda:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl6jn-DdafM
@tanstaafl
This comment is wrong in so many ways. First, I do believe we have already been to the moon. Saying otherwise is like saying Trump didn't actually win the 2016 election. Secondly Trump has built new and repaired old wall/fence for almost 100 miles, not a few as you suggest. To a Trump supporter it really doesn't matter if its a wall or a fence or cardboard with nails sticking out of it as long as it contains illegal crossings. Also Trump supporters don't really care if Mexico pays for the wall by writing a check or if it is a euphemism for the reduction of our cost to society by not containing the problem. There is a reason our President is a stable genius
What you say about science will go undisputed, so I will be disputatious and quote from Mann's "The Magic Mountain."
"[The degradation of man] coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing ... that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy -- which turned the focal point of the universe, that sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to possess the creature whom they both ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet, and ... has put an end to man's grand position in the cosmos ...'
"'There is no such thing as pure knowledge. The validity of ecclesiastical science -- which can be summarized in Saint Augustine's statement: 'I believe, that I may understand' -- is incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. ... Whatever profits man is true. ... Theoretical knowledge with no practical application in the realm of man's salvation is so totally uninteresting that we must deny it any value as truth and exclude it entirely. ... It is childish to believe that the Church defended darkness against light. Rather, she did what was right ... in declaring criminal any 'unbiased' striving for a knowledge of things. What has led man into darkness, and will continue to lead him ever deeper is 'unbiased' -- that is, aphilosophical -- natural science.'"
The problem is that the Republican Party has rotted out America's institutions as pure acid rots out metal.
We have a federal system of 50 separate state elections: about 2/3 of these states - many lightly populated - are run by Republicans who pledge allegiance to systematic voter suppression laws and voter file purges.
This systematic voter suppression rigs election outcomes that in turn rig the already rigged Electoral College into tyranny of the minority.
The Senate (and the Electoral College) are effectively a nationwide Republican gerrymander, guaranteeing over representation to Republistan while large ignoring the majority will of the people.
Add in the Republican Dark Arts of serial obfuscation, obstructionism, and their 24-hour Grand Old Propaganda news channel....and the GOP has largely reincarnated the Wiemar Republic, American-syle.
Add in the rigged Republican courts from stolen elections, and the Republican coup d'etat is utterly flourishing in America.
The idea that all citizen votes are 'equal' in the USA is laughable.
Republican votes count for more than Democratic votes because the Republican Party has burned down democracy, representative government, the one-person-one-vote-principle and any pretense of free and fair elections.
And their refusal to compromise in deference to scorched earth obstructionism essential makes them incredibly successful public policy pirates.
America has been hijacked by Republicans fundamentally opposed to democracy.
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@Socrates
I heard Ken Star invoke the Republican complaint that there is not bipartisanship in this impeachment. There was bipartisanship in the Clinton impeachment, he intoned in his smooth deceitful gaslighting of Americans. He complained that there was not one Republican vote for impeachment.
Since Obama came into office, there has been a melting of the Senate into one rigid mold. They complain that the ACA was not bipartisan, though there was ample debate, process, Obama tried to reach across the aisle and perhaps gave up too much, Republicans offered amendments and they lost fair and square. They, the losers in a Democratic process, howled to high heaven that it wasn't bipartisan.
And now in this impeachment, they make the same complaint. They refuse to be bipartisan and blame it on the Democrats, who are allowed to act their own in good conscious and responsibility.
Ted Cruz once said that bipartisanship is when Democrats come over the the Republican side. Unfortunately, that is all too true.
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@Socrates
You cite a litany of 'Republican Dark Acts' - all of which are basically the truth (there's that word again). But that's old news - we know all that. Much harder is the question, what do we do about it? Just one example that does not get the coverage it deserves is the attempted reformation of the Electoral College by numerous states which commit their electors to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. If enough states do that (probably around two thirds), the undemocratic abuse of a popular vote loser taking the Presidency is pretty much nullified. We need to start looking for solutions, not just submit to the rhetoric of complaint. Republicans are wedded to power and have learned to take advantage of the holes in the Constitution that we all know are there. It's time to close those holes.
19
@Bear Lass 228 representatives voted to impeach Clinton. 230 voted to impeach Trump. There was more of a consensus for the latter, even if only one Republican was on board.
9
The "truth"? Where does that exist? I think you are confusing facts with truth. Truth is a conclusion, infused with all of our human biases - political, social, economic - based on facts which are, at some level, well, facts.
Reasonable people can look at the same facts and come to different conclusions about what they mean - i.e. the "truth". That doesn't mean that each is living in a fantasy world where desire trumps fact. You conveniently choose an event on the long tail - wanting the theory of evolution to be false - to indict the fat part of the curve.
In fact (pun intended), the view that there is some "objective truth" which can be divined by "experts" and that anyone who doesn't agree is a "denier" is absurd on the face of it and one of the more pernicious threats to democracy.
Even more laughable is the idea that academic institutions, the media (seriously?) and the judicial system are vanguards of this elusive truth.
The biggest threat to democracy is the outsourcing of the assimilation of facts into truth to institutions like academia and the media that are dangerously fraught with their own biases.
If you really want to safeguard democracy, encourage people to do the hard work of looking at the underlying facts and data themselves and drawing their own, considered conclusions about what truths those facts imply.
The only problem is that most issues are not a matter of true or false, but of different levels of impacts and different degrees of certainty and likelyhood. A UK citizen might accept a 50% chance of a 1% decrease of GDP per capita growth in the short term to be free from EU bureaucracy and hope for higher growth in the future. But not a 100% chance of 10% decrease. You suggest experts can reach consensus on these numbers, which if true would really help people make better informed decisions. But the truth is that they can't. Not because of self serving bias (which is a problem), but because of the inherent complexity of the economy.
The economy, like the climate, is a very complex system. Stoping carbon emissions today would not reduce economic growth, but kill almost immediatly millions of people. That is with 100% certainty, all energy experts would tell you. Compare that to a disputable likelyhood that carbon emissions will make some people in Bangladesh, gradually and with several years to plan and prepare, have to move from the coast, and to a false claim that they will make polar bears, which are increasing in number, go extinct.
Science is able to find truth when it is able to perform contolled experiments.
Predictions about the future of the economy or the climate, based on observational data and models, do not deserve to be called truth.
The argument that polar bear population numbers are increasing is advanced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), an organization founded and funded by Lord Lawson, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher. Lord Lawson and his foundation use selective increases in polar bear numbers to argue against climate change warnings.
In some geographical areas, polar bear populations have increased since Canada placed restrictions on hunting polar bears. Of the 19 polar bear groupings, 13 are in Canada.
But even though numbers have increased in some areas, the condition of the animals is deteriorating. The animals have below normal weight and the number of cubs is down. Sea ice is decreasing, making it more difficult for polar bears to hunt.
Like so many issues involving climate change, polar bear population is complex, dependent on varying components. Organizations like the GWPF can take a single issue like polar bear population numbers and manipulate facts to “prove” their argument against the idea of catastrophic climate change.
It is important to do some basic background research before accepting a particular argument, even this one. Make it a habit.
1
What a bunch of social and philosophical and political and economic opinionated pundit 'science' nonsense about the ' truth'.
There are too many variables and unknowns to craft the double-blind experimental/ randomized controlled experimental tests that provide predictable and repeatable results that are the essence of science.
The truth is that 70% of physical reality is a mysterious force called dark energy.
And another 25 % of physical reality is a strange mass called dark matter.
While the 5% of physical reality that we ' know' is divided by two theories Quantum Mechanics and Relativity that can't be reconciled.
The truth is that we are African primate apes driven by our evolutionary fit DNA genetic biological nature to crave, fat, salt, sugar, habitat, water, sex and kin by any means necessary including conflict and cooperation.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace uncovered the ' truth' about our animal vertebrate mammal primate nature.
3
Powerful article for a somber day and a wrinkle in time.
The question begs about solving problens with guns and bombs.
I fear that at the rate we're going, Trump's reelection might just put us one giant step closer.
1
Harari gets it very right until the last three paragraphs, its starts reading as a leftist.
The best example he gives is climate change, for which, of course, Trump is right: when the "Paris Accords" gave China the right to generate a much CO2 as ity desired, with no string attached, it became obvious that they were a Leftist way
to ruin the West.
To make matters even worse, we are now seeing the rise of progressive movements that first gain power by inciting hatred against straight white males, and then systematically take over institution that might limit their power. Their primary targets are exactly those institutions that protect the truth: the media, the courts, the academy, and the education of children. Progressive activists fear the truth because it doesn’t obey them, so they claim it doesn’t exist. The typical progressive leader flatters people by telling them that the only thing that matters is their own identity and their 'oppression'. Experts who point out inconvenient truths are rebranded as racists who are full of hate and suffer from various 'phobias'.
Especially in a caucus when you are working 3PM-11pm at the nursing home. Pulling in $11.50 an hour though, so that helps.
1
“That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights.”
Say, again? Since when?
1
Great article but published on the wrong side of the media landscape. I would much rather see this over at Fox.
"The 2020 election season...enters a new phase Monday..."
No, the last phase began Friday when Mitch McConnell looked in the eye of the 75% of Americans who wanted witnesses during Trump's impeachment trial and said, in effect: "You no longer have a say in how this country is run. Get used to it."
Suppose Trump is 10 points down in the polls in mid-October. Do you really think there will be an election? Do you really think AG Barr would disapprove if Trump shut down key polling places or even revoked the broadcast licenses of CNN and MSNBC?
A new dictatorship began last Friday. The only people who can bring it down serve in our armed forces. If they won't stop Trump, America is finished.
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@WDG I don't think we are at the point of a military coup yet! First we need to see just how bad Trump can get when he is unchecked. Granted I would rather not find out, but that is the reality we are facing. At this point things are not bad enough for a military coup, which would make the country far worse off and set a dangerous precedent. The Democratic nominee CAN win in November and even has a voter advantage as long as young people go out and vote more!
11
@Daniel Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that Trump will ultimately issue a totally lawless order, and, when riots led by democracy loving Americans break out, he will need our military to restore order and enforce it. Barr will tell our armed forces that Trump's order is perfectly legal and they therefore must honor their oath to obey a legal command of their commander-in-chief. Does our Secretary of Defense have the backbone to refuse to carry out Trump's nonsense? What about the Joint Chiefs of Staff? If no one stands up, democracy goes down.
10
This is a logical discussion about a societal issue. The reason that people do not agree on the facts is due to society's loss of trust in institutions and experts. There is no reasoned discussion that makes a difference. It is a sign of the fracture of current society in an age of virtually infinite facts interspersed with fiction, and the loss of authority with the loss of religion. We are entering a new dark ages that will exist until society finds a new organizing structure.
What should voters demand of their politicians or political candidates is a valid question regarding much of what your article discusses.
Yes, politicians have to represent all of the people. They must take into consideration the pluses and minuses, truths and fictions and potential outcomes of their decisions.
On the other hand, we the people, should demand 100% transparency on all issues. Without being presented with the best information available at the time when votes are being cast and policies being formed how can the public have the confidence that they understand the issues at hand.
In the USA we have to be certain the legal precepts of our Constitution are being followed.
For instance, President Trump has tried to obstruct Congress from obtaining information it believes it needs to make valid decisions on how to proceed. True, if the public doesn't care if the truth is important, as you say, that becomes their choice.
I have one additional comment to make regarding Trump. A journalist's assignment was to cover a Trump rally. After the rally ended she asked one of the attendees why she supported Trump. Her reply, "I know he lies but I trust him."
Yes, it's an illogical answer and, truthfully, it makes my skin crawl. I discussed this comment with a long term friend. Her response caught me off guard. She said, Richard, there a lot of stupid people in the United States. She's right, then, again, they have a right to vote.
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@Richard
Your story reminds me of the NYT report a few months prior to the 2016 election, explaining to readers why Trump supporters chose him. The last interviewee said (and I paraphrase to the best of my memory):
I’d like a change. Trump is a little crazy and may even get us all killed. But I don’t care; I just want change.
8
This sounds nice, but what happens when one political party's supporters almost entirely control the media (except for one cable network watched by about a million old people) and the universities? Who will tell the public about misstatements by their favored candidates?
2
@Amanda Curious how you could possibly believe that a political party controls "the universities." I can think of a handful of universities right off the bat who are definitely controlled by religious institutions (not political parties). Regarding cable network "watched by old people" - it seems certain you mean Fox (faux) News, which is nothing more now than a propaganda arm of a political party, while mainstream media continue to bend over backwards to avoid being accused of being controlled by a political party. Maybe you are suggesting that white is black, and black is white? Because that's also the suggestion of that same political party ...
There has always been disinformation and untruths told in US election history. The difference between "then" and "now" is unfettered power of the internet and now unfettered power of the presidency. The combination of these two forces will make it extraordinarily to discern the Truth and whether the information comes from friend or foe.
2
@ABermant I am curious as to what rules/laws have changed for this presidency from past ones that makes this one have more power? I am not aware of any granting of special powers. The only difference is that you have someone who does not play by the same past political methods of operation. Everything that Trump has done has been there for past presidents as well. If you want to say that he has not demonstrated the same ethics and morals as past presidents you would be correct. But nothing new has given him new authority to do what he does.
@DC Semantics here. Rules may not have changed, but the "norms" that have been abided by by previous presidents have been simply blown out of the water.
@DC - One major difference is the newly-proven ability to manipulate individual opinions by using data points and algorithms as demonstrated by Cambridge Analytical. It is a great power that can be bought and is being knowingly used by master-manipulators like Putin and simply exploited by thugs like Trump.
A thoughtful argument by a brilliant person unfortunately mired in moral relativism and 19th century liberalism. Institutions are bought and sold every day. Witness the Senate, whose pollution now threatens the Supreme Court downstream. Citizens United unfettered money's influence on our politicians, parties and institutions. And has there ever been a time where truth was in more ignominious retreat? Nothing is safe. Nothing is exempt.
3
@ThomHouse Don't forget to include the influence of unions in the past as another example. But of course it does not fit the narrative that only Republicans have been influenced in their voting by outside parties.
@DC Point taken, but where the money was flowing from a kitchen faucet before, it now gushes from a fire hose. Also, Citizens United allows much of that money to be given anonymously through Super Pacs. So it was bad then, it's worse now, both sides do it, but the advantage is definitely on the corporate side, which favors Republicans--but more importantly, favors entrenched corporate interests over grassroots activism.
1
@DC - It is precisely because of unions that America enjoyed a golden era of the rise of the middle-class in the fifties and sixties. That was also a time when gazillionaires were taxed at 90 per cent.
1
I disagree that voters get to decide on how to respond to climate change. How is disadvantaging future voters-by kicking the can of dealing with climate change-any different from the example in which Harari said it's wrong for 51% to take away the voting rights of the 49%? How is it okay for our democracy to decide to emit carbon on such a scale that it endangers the livelihood of Bangladeshis?
1
A sound and lucid article, very much enjoyed reading it.
I don't think this editorial accounts for the lopsidedness of American political parties. Here, Republicans almost never compromise and over time they have gotten much more conservative. On the other hand, the official stance of many mainstream Democrats is to compromise as much as possible.
3
@Jeremiah Crotser
I think the article is making is different point. Compromise among politicians and political parties is not necessarily like the kind of compromise voters make. Elections are ultimately cooperative endeavors, and the the democrats must bring together a lot of different people with different ideas to win. Much more so than republicans who are ideologically and demographically less diverse than the democrats.
1
The big "if" is that people want to preserve democracy. Unfortunately, all too many Americans and their elected officials are willing to forego the long-term benefits of democracy--including the need to sustain institutions dedicated to seeking truth--for short-term gains in power.
4
This is a brilliant piece, but I disagree with a fundamental statement.
"Populist regimes fear the truth because it doesn’t obey them, so they claim it doesn’t exist."
Not necessarily, Populists are pointing to truths hidden by the establishment because it favors big interests and big corporations at the expense of ordinary workers.
2
@Alexgri As someone who has grown up in communism, I would say that communism and totalitarian regimes fear the truth because it doesn't obey them. But the populists are at the exact opposite spectrum! They allow more truth than convenient for big business and special interests.
@Alexgri
Populists use emotions arguments in order to manipulate people. Fear is not a truth, and populists, such as Trump demonstrably favor big interests, at the expense of ordinary workers.
2
@Covert Not only emotions, also tabu issues. Bernie Sanders talks about very specific issues, trade, healthcare and education. Same for Trump -- these issues have been buried by special inyerest interest for decades.
Vote for "politicians who respect the institutions that investigate and publish the truth."?
Do you include the institutions that routinely allow corporations to settle cases by paying millions in fines without acknowledging wrong doing? Like the ones that allow our government to lie to us about wars such as Vietnam and Afghanistan? Or like the institutions that "tortured some folks" or lied to us about surveillance or about going to war in Iraq? Like the institutions that make special deals for wealthy individuals so their kids can get into elite colleges and universities? Like the oversight institutions that allowed opioids to become an epidemic? You mean like the corporations that increase medical care costs so their profits go up while preventing millions from being covered at all.
I could go on but if you understand my point it won't be lost on you that institutions that investigate and publish the truth are failing us.
4
The separation of institutions of desire (fair & free elections) from institutions of truth (academia, press, judiciary) have proved fundamental in the creation of our modern order. Unfortunately, the manipulation of desire by special interests (government and corporate) threatens to upend a balance that has been centuries in the making. Harari’s solution is voting for politicians who support the institutions of the truth, but this alone will not mitigate the threat; after all, this solution is overly reliant on the very institution it strives to save.
In addition, we must endow the emerging voting demographic with a sufficient civics education. As it stands, the state of civics education in this country is shockingly subpar. (only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government)
The decades long trend of divestment from education only abets the mass manipulation of desires Harari warns us of.
2
People are choosing every day what to believe is true. That doesn't change the fact that the truth is what it is. But we have a problem when some people choose to believe it's not true.
Some of us believe in science and truth and decency and some believe the truth is what they hear on Fox or the Internet or whatever Trump shouts or tweets.
Rational people cannot win an argument with irrational people who just want to bully their way through the world.
4
@sfdphd
And some actually believe what they hear on CNN and MSNBC. Amazing!
We still have "the courts, the media and academy". But what happens when the system has been rigged for so long that a large segment of the population has never been in contact with academia and have accepted the idea that it is a tool of the elites, when the judges have been selected not for their wisdom, prudence and sensibility but for their political inclinations and their acquiescence of particular orthodoxies, and, as a result, when this large segment of the population has been trained to accept "truths" coming from only "loyal" media outlets centered on reinforcing the disdain for academia, the distrust of institutions, the negation of inconvenient truths and the belief that anyone not thinking like them are traitors?
3
People can vote all they like, but a government controlled by authoritarians will not cede control.
6
Well written and thought-provoking column. A few comments. First democratic politics in general are structured by rhetoric more than by simple truth-seeking. Unfortunately, the long tradition of rhetorical reasoning, which takes desire and emotion and beliefs and values and acknowledged facts into a process of reaching the best grounds for agreement is mostly forgotten in education and mostly untaught. Among our many recent disinheritances, this is certainly a consequential one.
Second, the way we express our disagreement matters. The bitter hostility and extreme statements from some of our political leaders have now gone beyond the pale. These statements serve their political purpose on one level, but they alienate most voters (who have tuned out) and they do lasting damage. Democracy can be rough and tumble without being bitter and hostile and destructive.
Third, Harari seems to me over-optimistic about academic institutions. Higher education has been captured by one political party. This is evidenced by party affiliation and campaign contributions. Boghossian et. al. have exposed the lack of integrity in journal editorial boards. The UC system is now being undermined by using diversity pledges to discriminate against job candidates. The Democratic Party's capture of the faculty is complete, and the radical activist wing of that party has now captured administrative power, too.
Finally, the media is self-evidently anti-Republican.
1
@Nathan Really? the largest media outlet in the country is Fox News, which really functions as state TV. it is this kind of disconnect to reality that has our ship sinking perilously low...
@Nathan
That is because Republicans want to insist that only they know the truth, what you hear with your ears and what you read with your eyes is false unless it comes from us regardless of the FACTS.
@curt hill Yes, really. NYT, WaPo, LAT, CNN, MSNBC, AP, almost all major news services, media outlets, and entertainment outlets except Fox News are anti-Republican and overwhelmingly anti-Trump. Fox News has a huge number of viewers because it offers just about the sole alternative viewpoint.
What happens when the people of one country, say the U. S., choose short term comfort that results on the deaths of millions in another country, say Bangladesh? It seems that local democratic processes might be inadequate, no?
4
Are the state institutions equipped to promote compromise? For example, if the system supports one group of citizens over others, it is difficult to achieve compromised, because the other group always will feel that it is a not compromise, but rather force, even although system allows everybody to vote. The equal voting rights could be distorted by money, gerrymandering or by the EC. Who will ensure that the vote leads to compromise, not just domination of one group?
2
“To safeguard the future of democracy, we must keep truth independent of desire. It is not enough to declare loyalty to the abstract ideal of truth. The key is institutions. However imperfect, only institutions can turn ideals into social practices.“
True, and the crisis, is with those failing institutions- the media, the academy, the military, the judiciary- have all been corrupted by Money, read Capital, read Corporations. The examples are manifold.
One current example re: Climate Science. You would think the tech companies like Google, Amazon, Dell, Microsoft would be strong supporters of climate change science, and, if you go to their web sites, you will see they all have laudatory, future, carbon neutral goals. But go to Open Secrets & you will see that all of these companies have given money, this 2020 election cycle, to Sen. James Inhofe- the biggest climate science denier in Congress. I’ll wait till I see MSNBC report this, much less Fox. And SCOTUS thinks this is perfectly acceptable speech.
6
@Spike Thank you for sharing this.
But elections are about what do you truly want. And some candidates and the MSM including the Times attempt to obscure what candidates truly stand for. The best example is how you are saying Medicare for All would be too expensive, when it would actually save a great deal of money while bringing compassion and sanity to health care in this country.
4
Excellent analysis, Prof. Harari. Your write-up deals with nuance, uncertainty, and complexity that are inherent in all questions, whether sociological or scientific. Unfortunately, people these days are increasingly unwilling to admit such nuance and simply look at issues in the most black-and-white way possible.
3
Mr. Harari has a good mind and he makes good distinctions. The fact that we are driven equally by desire and the need for truth is fundamental. We used to call this kind of thing human nature, that is, it rings true about us. For example, the desire of the many in the last election led us to choose Trump to be President and those of us who had a different desire had to take our lumps. As long as a democratic system is in place the electorate (so to speak) will choose its leaders and be stuck with its choices. Being a philosopher, Harari is in love with truth and facts matter to him because the truth is based on facts. But the electorate is not composed of philosophers (as he surely understands) and desire unleashed from facts can and does trump truth in many instances. Yes, the desires of the many can go awry, and so must be brought under the sway of philosophy (love of truth.) That was Plato's point and human nature hasn't changed all that much since he said it. There's nothing wrong with desire of course. After all, we humans have a complex soul. The part we call desire just needs to be led to make good choices by the part we call reason. Sometimes we are able to do that and sometimes we aren't and when we don't a Trump is what we get. It's reason's turn this time.
4
There's something regular people have in greater degree than intellectuals: common sense. Without their voices, we'd be trying all manner of harebrained schemes. What happens if working-class blacks are a primary reason, again, that Sanders fails to garner the nomination? What if they vote overwhelmingly for Biden, just as they did for Clinton? Will leftists be joining the GOP in suppressing the black vote, though for entirely different reasons? "If they only knew what's best for them."
To leftists, the more you offer the People, the better your platform is and the better person you are. If I run for president and one-up Sanders on everything he offers, I could then claim that Sanders is merely a neoliberal squish. At which point, Piketty will write a book telling everyone that I'm right. (As it happens, the question of why the French are so repulsed by classical liberalism is interesting. In a parallel universe, here would commence a hackneyed discussion of French history, beginning, perhaps, with Louis XVI's sacking of Turgot.)
What this is, or at least what this partially is, is an argument against arguments against the People determining elections; an argument, in a way, against technocracy. But the fact is that who can vote has changed a lot over time, and is quite arbitrary. It's not clear to me that "anyone can vote!" is the best route to take, although perhaps this is just a reaction to Trump. (Though if it was, would that not be understandable?)
1
So stuck in right and left that you can't think. THAT'S the problem these days.
@David L, Jr. Interesting point of view. Thank you for sharing.
2020 is about the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, voter suppression and fair taxation between the wealthy and the other 90 percent. It’s about truth and decency and women’s autonomy. It’s about strengthening our institutions and investing in infrastructure and finally it is about the public health option which will free us from corporate tyranny.
Vote blue no matter who and all the way through the ballot.
7
This all assumes we have a genuine election, yes? Donnie and the GOP have guaranteed us that we will get the election that Donnie, in his great and unmatched wisdom, thinks is in the public=his best interest.
10
Here, here, Prof. Harari.
The problem we now face in the US is that "hiding or distorting the truth" is on offer; indeed it is the only thing the Trump cultists have on offer. The whole history of the Trump presidency has been one of constant lies and distortions.
Yes, compromise is the goal, but it can be very difficult when one side believes it can manufacture its own set of facts and truth becomes irrelevant.
6
The problem I see in this otherwise thoughtful analysis is the assumption that the institutions that we rely on to call balls and strikes are consistent, viable and utilizable. The court is a wonderful countermeasure to an authoritarian out of control if the court is efficient and available. What we are seeing now is a breakdown of our system of government because we don't have a functioning court system to effectively push back against a maverick co-equal branch. And without local media to offer diverse viewpoints from the national media there is no realistic counter-punch there either.
6
Elections in America are not about the truth but about finding compromise between people of vastly different desires?
Yes, of course. The problem is this: People often speak of the truth as being something general, accessible to all, indeed neutral (see Bertrand Russell: "Whatever the truth may be, it's in its essence neutral") but in actuality the truth comes to us in particular form, in fragments, and in a variety of ways depending on our intellectual, artistic, physical, emotional, etc. attributes and only becomes whole, one truth, neutral, by being watered down, generalized, spread across society.
In other words, most people cannot understand what it's like to perform physically at an Olympic level, or to paint like Cezanne. Nor can they grasp advanced mathematics or what it's like to play chess at grandmaster level. All these particular truths escape them. What most people understand are general truths such as how to drive a car or how to cook a meal or have a child, yet they go about every day thinking they can readily grasp THE truth, as if it's one thing and not manifesting in a variety of ways in different people, and that in fact it mostly escapes them.
Worse, politics/economics and even science itself encourages this misunderstanding. Most scientists even if saying a scientific theory depends on evidence accept a theory as true by something of majority vote, by how general, understood by all it can be made, and play down concept of truth understood by the few.
3
@Daniel12
Sorry, I'm not interested in chess grandmasters or math heads running the country. Both groups are possibly the least useful citizens on the planet.
"The majority of voters should not have the power to stop academic departments and media outlets from studying and publishing undesirable truths."
Studying and publishing require funding, and typically more in the sciences than in Prof. Harari's areas. The majority of voters and the people they elect can control the truths that scientists investigate by their funding decisions, even if they theoretically allow academic freedom.
6
We need to have an electorate who know what they are required to decide and do so thoughtfully. Right now most people are poorly informed and are seriously affected in their decisions by marketing campaigns that play on their psychological wants and social sense of identity. This is why money can decide the outcome of elections.
6
@Casual Observer
Is this new? No.
The electorate prefers to be IGNORANT and ENTERTAINED.
I like the “truth” versus “desire” as two opposite human goals. Those who seek truth are usually well educated and realistic in stating their goals and desires. Those who desire something they feel is good, without realistic assessments of their objective validity, are following their gut and, frequently, a charismatic con-man who may easily convince them what is good or not for them.
My understanding is that all human being have both tendencies in them, it is that they have desires and ideals but at the same time their realism (truth) keep them in check. One inclination is verified by the other, and usually it is their realism that check their desires
(Fantasies). The truth is the gate keeper for their desires. Ignorance removes this check and make their desires removed from the reality. Unchecked desires (fantasies) will then lead to alternative reality where the “new truth” is becoming equivalent to desires.
3
The presumption of liberalism is that humans share a like set of needs and aspirations which if rationally considered can result in a consensus among the people in a polity that allows majority decision making to serve all well enough.
At this time in our history, elections are viewed as license to impose the will of those who have won an election upon all others. Thus we have Republicans and especially Trump’s supporters gleefully defying the wishes of half or more with the assertion that, “elections have consequences.” It’s actually a rather thoughtless attitude. The authority to govern comes from the governed. Breaking the consensus which gives that authority is inane.
6
I'm always wary when the word "truth" is invoked as a comparison to anything. t is currently fashionable to assign scientists as the gatekeepers of truth, but, alas, their record as truthtellers is as checkered as priests and politicians, and their openness to contradiction is as great as other fundamentalists. In social evolution "truth" is constantly shifting to keep up with fashionable paradigms. Those paradigms are currently so polarized that the assertion of truth truly depends on what piece of the elephant (or donkey) is being perceived.
Ultimately, the truth we acknowledge has more to do with public acceptance than any immutable reality. Our only hope is that an evolving collective conscience will lead us to solutions that are are based in kindness.
And that's the truth.
4
@michaeltide
I am sorry, but “Scientist record as truth tellers is as checkered as priests and politicians” is simply an ignorant statement.
The whole progress in humanity, from the beginning 50,000 years ago, is the proof that truth (what scientists/engineers have been advancing) has always won eventually even if dismissed, or even ridiculed, at every turn. The more scientifically-oriented society is the more technologically advanced it is. The more religious it is the more more backwater it becomes.
1
"In a democracy voters are perfectly entitled to prefer nationalist sentiments and religious ideals over economic interests."
And this is the heart of what is wrong with pure democracy. Should the public be convinced that there is an invading force of indigents coming from another country that they believe is harming them directly or indirectly, their nationalistic instinct would be to intercept them all at the border and rip their children from their arms.
A significant portion of voters are easily swayed with fear, which overrides any dispassionate analysis of facts. Humans acting(and voting) out of fear leads to disasters for everyone, including the same voters.
I propose a solution that involves making sure only qualified candidates can vote on policies in their fields of expertise, but creating barriers of expertise has a shameful history for our most basic civic duty of citizenship voting. Our congress is divided up into subcommittees that are supposed to be experts on a particular field of policy. But more often we don't have experts staffing these committees, but instead people with strong feelings. The only expertise that appears common to most of our elected officials is graft.
3
I think many readers misunderstand Harari's claim that elections are about a "peaceful compromise". To my understanding, he is not here claiming that they are about producing bi-partisan deals and policy compromises. Rather, accepting the results of elections is *itself* the compromise: almost all Democrats accept that Trump is the president, even if they hate the fact and have qualms about the electoral college system. Thus the Obama administration willingly (if sadly) handed the reigns of the government over to him and his people. Equally, most Republicans, accepted the Democrats taking back the House in 2018, and willingly (if begrudgingly) handed the gavel to Ms. Pelosi whom they hate so much.
The compromise, in other words, is accepting the mechanism of elections as that which determines who holds power. The alternative, as Harari points out, is physical violence.
You can mention gerrymandering and even outright voter fraud etc etc all you want. These are serious issues, but they are only issues BECAUSE the underlying premise of Mr. Harari's holds true. Everyone accepts elections as the decisive factor and THEREFORE fight so hard to win them (including sometimes in ethically dubious or outright criminal ways!). This point may seem trivial but it is not. History shows that this compromise is neither self-evident not invincible. It can break down (e.g. the American Civil war) and when it does the consequences are always dire.
9
Great read but one thing is missing.
Brexit will not be either a disaster or Nirvana and any future state of economy, good or bad or in between, will be subject to arguments by biased experts denying credit or assigning blame.
Same with climate change. The true degrees of human contribution to climate never ending changes and final impact are impossible to determine by facts. Claiming otherwise discredits experts. Models are tweak - able models, not facts.
How about a big impact that slows the onset of the next Ice Age? And if the polar bears are doing ok will we stop sensible measures towards renewables?
The facts and desires are both biased. Any statistic can be packaged or subsets omitted to communicate a biased point.
The tensions the author wants to address are due more by politics in the world of facts than by popular desires.
1
At this low moment for our democracy, Yuval’s argument that truth has no place in elections is valuable. That they are entirely separate things, with different areas for their application. It’s a good treatment…but it’s not enough. We need more original thought on this relationship. There are problems to overcome.
Do we really want to encourage even less truth in elections? Isn’t it bad enough?
We still have to unravel whether (and when) there is “Only one truth,” or “Multiple truths.” (See today’s article on Goop that implicitly gets at this.)
Existing institutions for “Doing Truth,” academia and media, have their own blind spots and complacencies.
Complex societal issues tend to hold interconnected issues of fact (some of which may not be), interpretation, and values. Simply calling for their separation doesn’t help.
Non-voters (not those who can but don’t bother) deserve concern, too, such as the species with whom we share the planet, and future citizens.
I flagged an article with a title showing me we’re up to 50 cognitive biases now. Last I knew there were 20, and 14 before that. That’s a lot of ways to fool ourselves. Are we ever encouraged to ask whether our views, or even underlying perspectives, are being effected by a bias—especially when we are so certain?
We need to practice recognition and reflection about our assumptions, stop worshipping certainty, get used to re-thinking, stop spending so much time, as Postman said, “Amusing ourselves to death,” and more.
3
Prof. Harari recapitulates philosophy from the 18th century. Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behavior, famously proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions".
The primacy of feelings, emotions, passions is not absolute. Children the intellectually or emotionally impaired ought to be subject to reasonable constraints. Unfettered passions often have negative consequences.
Civilization depends on a delicate balance between desire and reason. Our current problem in the USA is that one man and his cult of personality have radically tilted the balance away from fact based understanding and positive emotions.
We can hope that positive desires for knowledge, truth, transparency and humane decency will weigh appropriately in the coming elections. Unfortunately, the US Senate has provided evidence that they will not.
And we have a Vice President and a Secretary of State who are passionate about the Second Coming:
'A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Yeats
So far in the 21st century, political and religious desires are doing violence to reason.
8
@Steve M -- "Our current problem in the USA is that one man and his cult of personality have radically tilted the balance away from fact based understanding and positive emotions."
This is a double failure. It fails to get the point of the column. Worse, it presumes that only the writer's own side has any truth or valid emotions.
A win requires understanding the facts that drive the other side, and the valid positive emotions, at least well enough to win over some who share both side's concerns.
Too many Democrats make the horrible, Hillary-like arrogant mistake of thinking the other side is ignorant, hate filled, and simply wrong about everything.
60 million voting Americans are not all ignorant, hate filled, and entirely wrong about everything. They just disagree with you. Driving them away is not a winning approach, notice what happened last time.
Many readers will now wonder, "Okay, so what do they know that isn't a lie, and what emotions do they have that are not just negative?" See, you don't even know. You haven't even really considered it. Arrogant. Deserves to lose.
1
@Mark Thomason
Well Mark, that's a scathing critique. I know a few Trump supporters. For the most part they believe that climate change is a hoax, special counsel and congressional investigations are baseless witch hunts, everyone should be armed at all times and Jesus will greet them in heaven when they die. The emotions associated with those beliefs include resentment of scientists, law enforcement investigators and the enemies of the people media; suspicion of intellectuals; paranoia about very low probability physical threats and uncritical credulity derived from childhood religious indoctrination. They do also have many positive emotions. They love their families and their pets. They are happy when their political or sports team wins. They are delighted when members of groups that they hate, especially liberals, are non-plussed, outraged or saddened by what Trump, McConnell and Pompeo are doing.
Do you really think that most Democrats or Independents have never met or talked with one of those 90% of Republicans who condone Trump's ignorance, egotism, petty vindictiveness and lying?
1
What do you do when the compromises are incompatible with your financial reality, health (water and air), and safety? Backward is not compatible.
4
@poslug -- They too have a financial reality, health concerns, and safety needs. They may not be the same solutions as yours, nor the same risks, but they have them too.
The compromise is to make both you and them financially sound, healthy, and safe.
How can that be done? That's the compromise you asked about.
2
Do we not have a representative form of government to protect against ignorant people making uninformed decisions? If so, elections are probably not the issue as much as "truthiness".
4
@g -- No.
It is not an elite guardianship.
We rejected the whole noblesse oblige
concept.
2
@Mark Thomason
Then you have just rendered the Democratic Party as groundless.
Elections can work only when the overall policy framework, the meaning of the institutions that will implement the decisions of the electorate, are accepted by all parties. When an election is held to determine the framework itself, whether we should be a democracy or an authoritarian ethnic state, the result is only more division and chaos, a hardening of antagonisms. Consider the much-vaunted Iraqi election of 2005, which merely sorted that battered country into Shiia and Sunni subgroups. In America, the election of Lincoln didn't resolve the question of chattel slavery, only war did. And no election in 2020 will resolve the problem that a significant minority--indeed, the largest single faction in the country--does not want to live with democratic compromise but has surrendered to a malignant cult of personality. Because the opposition to Trump is fragmented, he will likely win reelection, but even if he doesn't, the election will do no more than the impeachment to rescue our dying nation. Whenever I hear people call for compromise in these conditions, they're really just saying they hope their side wins. I, for one, will never support him or his vision of America, no matter how many of my "fellow citizens" cast their votes for him. And I don't expect them to ever to agree with me, either.
3
@Jim McFarland
You have condensed the essence of the article in a nutshell with your last two sentences. Thank you.
As ever from Harari: lucid, but easy to understand!
3
Using the concept of desire instead of saying opinion, plan, policy, idea is destructive to the point and further complicates the problems caused by use of propaganda and misinformation.
2
Most people are not intellectually and informationaly equipped to reason about political decisions, much less make them. This is why we have experts - politicians.
1
@Hawkins Your position is astonishing elitist, calling to mind authoritarian parents who tell their children "You do not know what is good for you, but we do". Political decision express how we wish to organize our society, what we believe is right or wrong, and basically what we believe a human being is. Rendering 'most people' incompetent in terms of reason about or making political decisions is an endorsement of an elitist, authoritarian regime.
1
Do persons care about reasoning correctly even if involves recognizing inconvenient truth? Or do they sacrifice the ability to reason to desire. What kind of person do you wish to be?
2
@Roger Button -- "Do persons care about reasoning correctly even if involves recognizing inconvenient truth?"
No, most people can't do that.
Fortunately, their own most pressing needs usually seem quite "convenient" to them.
Then all that is needed is to make a good offer to help with those most pressing needs. The problem of course is that last time, the arrogant elite among the DNC just insulted those other than themselves, and offered NOTHING for their urgent needs, didn't even bother going there to talk about it.
Who, other than the author, ever thought elections were about "truth?" Sure, once upon a time--an age, it feels, far away!--we tended to prefer candidates we thought were generally honest. But even then, you didn't vote for "Honest Abe" because his election would bring truth to the executive branch. You voted--or didn't vote--for him because of your position on slavery and several other matters. This "truth" focus is enormously unhelpful.
2
Desire matters – to be sure. As a Buddhist might believe, I would say there exists not only bad desire such as for some instant gratification dangerous or unhealthy – e.g. to drive home after drinking; there is also good desire – e.g. to learn new things, i.e. further your education. True stuff might be valuable, as well. Lies do not worry me as long as they appear only truthful and do not harm anyone. A person might speak and have a wide variety of addressees, and also eavesdroppers; a lie – even a white one – might take away some advantage the listeners think they gain in listening, and could even do psychological harm if they act with respect to that which seems to be truthful but in fact is a lie.
@M. C. Major The truth is to be valued, always.
Unfortunately Brexit was voted in based on repeated lies from Farage and his ilk. I thought the professor would get back there but he never did. Sure, there are other reasons to have voted for it but the massively distorted cost benefit wasn’t one and the lies about immigrants and immigration weren’t true either.
3
@Robert Trosper -- Based *in part* on lies. That was true of both sides too, none were stellar truth tellers.
Brexit voters had real concerns. Those were neglected, and the result was ugly.
Better would have been to address those needs from inside the EU, but the British couldn't because they had a sold out fake Labour government followed by the Nasty Party imposing austerity on those in need for the enrichment of those not in need.
So, with that complete failure of both major parties to make the EU work for them, it was an easy sell to too many to toss the whole thing.
1
"The majority of voters should not have the power to stop academic departments and media outlets from studying and publishing undesirable truths."
I would like to make sure the author knows that is also applies to this scenario: The media outlets, academic institutes and individual people should not have the power to stop any individual from studying and publishing truths of skeptical positions. (Note the pillorying of Willie Soon) Majority rules does not make truth, as you say.
1
@Carol Gebert
A NY Times article states… "Willie Soon has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work".
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html
4
@Carol Gebert -- Assange. Snowden. Manning. Now Greenwald even in hiding in Brazil.
Who was it who sent out a State Dept memo asking if the US could assassinate Assange in his hideout? Hillary. A Democrat.
Who was it who crushed Bradley/ Chelsea Manning? It started with Hillary's State Dept, enraged that he'd leaked the truth in their memos. It has never let up, not under Obama, and not under Trump, nor has anyone of either party suggested it should.
So who tries to stop "publishing undesirable truths?"
Who tried to intercept Snowden's plane, forcing down the President of another country in the attempt to grab him? That was Kerry, who'd just taken over the State Dept.
Greenwald fled to Brazil during the Obama Admin, and nobody is now suggesting he'd be safe here today, not from either party.
So, about that truth? "You can't handle it."
2
"You might find yourself sharing a country with people who you consider ignorant" strange but I thought it was ignorant to say "who" when "whom" is better.
This is quite a simplistic view of democracy for as Gilens and Page have shown in their erudite book *Democracy in America?* there is a doubt whether democracy really exists in countries where the wishes (or desires as Harari says) of the majority are not translated into policies which reflect only elite interests.
In this simplistic model there is no space for the corrupting influence of money which shapes desires and expectations. To adapt a phrase first used by Lippman "the manufacture of consent" and popularized by Chomsky & Herman, (manufacturing consent) Harari does not deal in the manufacture of desire, the desire fueled by the money which buys elections.
3
While I appreciate and applaud the basic thrust of this piece, the thinking is muddled. For instance, Harari variously argues that democratic legislatures “can certainly” and are “not entitled” to pass laws that contradict “the truth.” In this he reveals one of the perils of drawing a simplistic and categorical dichotomy between “desire” and “truth.” Harari has made a fetish of reducing terribly complex phenomena down to seemingly self-evident yet provocative claims. Here he goes again. If only it were that simple!
2
Well written nonsense. Yes, it is better that we use election to change who is in charge - but where is there compromise.
And in the US, our many barriers to democracy, from the electoral college to gerrymandering and voter suppression - I suggest that one of us (Republicans) are simply holding on to power and the other (Democrats) still believe in good government and risk being slaughtered.
Time for Democrats to fight and fight dirty if needed.
3
@Terry McKenna -- Nonsense? We are truth and they are lies? That is not a winning attitude, it is how we got to a President Trump.
Tip O'Neil would never have let any of his people talk like that, even to the worst of the really awful politicians of his day.
@Mark Thomason I despair that it has gotten this bad but it has. By the way, I was a Republican in those days. Democrats are decent and expect decency. Republicans have nothing to say, but keep seeking power.
But in terms of this essay, voting is not where compromise occurs. Compromise occurs in legislating, but sadly does not anymore.
@Terry McKenna -- In those days, Michigan at least had a different breed of Republican, George Romney rather than Mitt. That father/son duo demonstrates the beginning of the downfall of Republicans, which hit bottom with Trump. Voting for George Romney is not the same as voting for Mitch McConnell.
Then the Federalist Society must be outlawed for influencing a large portion of judges towards ‘one team’
4
@RW -- The didn't just influence them. They selected candidates, mentored them, and brought them forward to the bench. They got what they paid for. That isn't influence. Thatis something more old fashioned in its corruption.
And yes, it should be disqualifying in a nominee, and illegal as the "appearance of impropriety" that is the definition of unethical for a judge.
2
Are we as a people doomed to the whims of our feelings? This would be bad enough, but when the feelings of the minority become the law of the land as in our system we can not even expect that majority feelings will be honored.
There is always a balance between what our emotions dictate and our thinking selves know is best for us. but when that balance becomes so out of whack we become blinded by our emotions and a herd of lemmings jumping off a cliff.
@just Robert -- "doomed to the whims of our feelings"
That isn't what he wrote.
We are not doomed to the opinions and "facts" of a few among us, not the other side, nor your side either.
1
I find my own truth. In my world Biden didn't vote for the Iraq war.
He didn't write the bankruptcy bill.
He didn't use soft power to get his kid jobs making millions .
He doesn't whenever confronted on his lousy voting record tell the person to vote for Trump.
1
True. You can't choose what is true. But you can choose what to believe is true. And as Fox "News" demonstrates on a daily basis, many Americans prefer to consume fiction over fact.
2
The last paragraph says it all.
All the fake news, alternate facts, no climate change and antivaxx purveyors should be forced to write this on a blackboard, or electronic device of choice, one hundred times a day.
As for Trump, an infinite number.
1
In a better world, the bears could vote too.
1
“No matter in which country you live, if you want to preserve democracy, vote for politicians who respect the institutions that investigate and publish the truth. Vote for a party that tells people that they have the right to elect whatever government they like, but they cannot elect whatever truth they like.”
Amen
5
I read Dr. Harari’s conclusion, and I agree that support for the institutions that represent the search for objective truth is necessary, though these institutions, the media, the courts, scientific and educational, etc may be flawed, support for these institutions are essential simply to protect the search for objective truth.
Unfortunately, the political system in the US is structured in such a way that provides for a permanent ruling minority of voters. This struck me again when it turned out that the 51 Senators who voted not to hear any further witnesses or see any further evidence in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump represented 19 million fewer Americans than the 49 Senators who voted to hear the evidence.
Just as the fact that 3 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump didn’t matter to this version of American democracy, neither does that the 1.2 million people in Wyoming and Alaska have exactly the same representation in the Senate as the 60 million people living in New York and California. It’s structural and is certainly a deep flaw in the system.
3
It's a well argued theoretical piece. Makes a lot of valid points.
But what do you do when the voters have been deliberately lied to and manipulated?
This is the case with Brexit and with MAGA campaign.
It's like asking children to opine after they have been promised endless candy.
Institutions do not help with that.
2
Most human societies don't give children the same say as their elders: it is assumed that they don't yet have the facilities to make good decisions for themselves. In general, that assumption is justified, e.g., the child wants to eat all of his Halloween candy at once, despite receiving the high-quality information that eating large amounts of candy at one sitting is going to give him a tummy ache. The child wants the pleasure of eating the candy and doesn't want to get ill.
Thus the problem with Professor Harari's argument that neatly divides:
- (1) an individual's desire for an outcome
- (2) the quality of information available to choose among outcomes
- (3) the capability of an individual to use that information to make such a choice.
The Framers of the Constitution, even without knowledge of the work of Kahneman and Twersky, understood that most people don't have the time or expertise to make complex decisions. Their solution, representative democracy, however, was more fragile than they hoped.
To make a computer analogy, the US Operating System, aka the Constitution, has been hacked. May of its error correction features (separation of powers, Amendment, Impeachment) have been disabled. Last week, the already hacked Senate decided that damaging its last remaining protective facility -- relatively frequent and fair elections -- is no big deal.
So, the US OS is now broken, leaving us at the mercy of a physics that couldn't care less about human choice.
2
@Eben -- Ah, so we should only allow people to vote if they agree with you, or at least share your position in life, your needs and wants?
@Mark Thomason & Eben - Your debate may be resolved by constitutional modification sometime after 2020 re-election to sanction DJT as President-for-Life, in national interest to be sure.
1
@Mark Thomason You've missed my point entirely. For all of its bugs, the Framers designed an OS whose logic inherently argues that the vote should be extended to every citizen and that every citizen has the responsibility to vote.
As system architects of the US OS, they understood that most citizens couldn't devote the time or have the capacity to make normatively rational decisions. Instead, they designed a representative democracy in which members of Congress were expected to do the work their constituents could not, with error correction features. To make decisions that reflected their constituents' wants without being fully bound to them. They trusted that voters could and would judge the character and competence of the candidates they elected.
The OS was far from perfect. As a product of its human programmers, their system contained bugs -- some for political expediency for its adoption by the states, some to maintain their own interests as members of the elite propertied and privileged class.
But they got much of it right enough so the OS functioned basically functioned for 231 years. They hoped that their error correction features couldn't all be disabled at the same time.
But determined hackers super-empowered by money have done so by exploiting the nominally democratic party primary rules adopted in the 70s & the concentration of population in a few states.
Mitch McConnell McConnell is, perhaps, the greatest hacker in history.
I think Bruni is avoiding the real issue. Yes, elections can decide questions like "Should Medicare be expanded to cover everyone?" It's a lot harder to argue that it can legitimately decide questions like "Should America repudiate most of the basic principles that it has stood for since its founding?"
Yes, I would rather settle questions like the first one by ballot even if I disagree strongly with the results. But the next election will decide a question more like the second.
I'm not saying a civil war is the answer if this election does not correct the nation's course, but in large part that's because I don't think anybody could win one. If it is lost, I'd probably leave I were younger,. Call me a rat if you want, but I don't want to stay aboard a sinking ship. Or one that's steaming determinedly into an iceberg.
1
The author suggests that "all citizens have equal rights", this cannot be further from the truth. Minorities are harassed into dropping their right to vote; corporations buy influence that ordinary citizens cannot; non-mainstream parties and candidates are excluded from media coverage. The "truth" as it is construed by the author belongs to a world of fantasy. We have stopped counting Trump's egregious lies, still he's the candidate who has raised the most money, by far: what does this tell us about the truth and rights?
6
@Farid
Don't forget prisoners.
1
Sorry, but I still believe there is a rational, objective, non-partisan thing called the truth that we should all be able to agree on. To say all sides are equal in the ongoing efforts to obliterate the truth, is just another concession to false equivalency. No, Trump's conspiracy theories involving Biden and Ukraine are not equivalent to the whistle blowers corroborated reports involving his "perfect" call with that country's president. Those theories were dreamed up by Putin, who is not our ally, and Trump's call was anything but "perfect." No, it is not fair game for a Republican Senator to pat himself on the back for not recommending Obama's impeachment. The former president committed no demonstrable offenses, while the current occupant of the WH has committed many. This is not kindergarten, where everyone gets to have their own "true" conspiracy theory as long as they share it with the whole class.
6
This essay does not address one problem—perhaps because it is an intractable one. How do we deal with the tyranny of those now living over those yet unborn? Climate change may make the lives of countless people—perhaps whole generations—miserable, or even (in the most extreme scenario) impossible. Do people now alive have the right to inflict this destiny on future generations, just because they like riding around in their big SUV's? How do we protect our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, who cannot vote for "what they want"? (Not to mention other life forms, whose continued existence on this planet is threatened—bears also don't get to vote....)
14
@Daniel I know Greta Thunberg has raised this point, and when one asks about preserving earth in sustainable ways for future generations not yet born, we've gone beyond a dichotomy of "truth" and "desire."
The "truth" about the future is that there may not be one if humans don't figure out how to rationally share the planet so all living things can foster a biologically diverse web or life. Any "desire" to live at this point in earth's history, must be subordinated to practical means for sustainability; "desire" deludes the thinker with a fiction of vast limits and infinite supplies.
Sadly, "desire" has far surpassed "truth" as a driver for all that happens on earth.
Indeed, "truth" has been distorted and twisted into meaninglessness, and "desire" functions as a kind of gooey stew in which ambition for goodies mires the voting public in a swamp of "lies."
We rational and sane humans need to help others break out of Plato's cave and see the dancing shadows for what they are: false representations of what is.
To Greta and Jane Fonda et al, keep on speaking truth to power whenever and wherever possible.
3
@Daniel
The humane impulses you describe can very much be part of people who vote and consume and have no children.
Perhaps it's a matter of building character, especially the trait of empathy. Through reading, interacting with other beings, and developing curiosity and widening ranges of interests.
But in the absence of empathy and character in those who hold power, you have to curb them through laws.
Yes, that process appears to be slow and can be corrupted, but it can work, powerfully, to create lasting change.
For instance, vehicle gas mileage laws, gasoline taxes ( and putting those taxes towards education or health care, rather than more roads), clean air and water legislation, recycling and trash-reduction-to-zero laws, etc. And those laws need to have positive feed-backs built in, so for instance any carbon credit or tax system needs to include a regular, timed reduction in allowed total emissions, and of course, teeth. Big, nasty penalties and monies to enable both compliance and follow-up justice.
The question “Do human actions cause the earth’s climate to warm?” is a question of truth.
It is a question of truth, but to arrive at a meaningful answer of "how much" we have to sort through an exhaustive amount of often conflicting data from persons and organizations that have a vested (i.e. monetary) interest in "discovering" that answer. But, since the author is an advocate of climate change policies, in his mind the truth is absolute and not subject to any uncertainty whatsoever.
1
Prof. Harari's point is nice, neat, trivially correct but distressingly irrelevant to the difficulties we face in advanced democracies.
Desire and fact are in causal equilibrium, each influencing the other. Conceptually, quality of life may indeed be dissectible into a product of material and notional well-being, but it remains just that, a multiplicative product. What governs quality of the result is coherence: coherence of fact production and coherence of desire, respectively and individually. We are losing coherence and as we do, our common sense, according to Arendt's usage, degrades.
On the left, there is a dry insistence that justice-as-fairness and naked meritocracy can wear the same clothes and profess the same moral principles; while on the right, there is an insistence that meritocracy is about ambition and not fairness, since naked ambition in a free market will produce as much fairness as can ever be hoped for in human affairs. Since both sets of premises are false, the result is increasingly disaffected and aggrieved cadres of the vulnerable in both camps.
Anyone who wished to lead this country productively would need to ford this swelled river of half-coherent rage and doublespeak. Without a coherent "why" to all of the "what," we are unlikely to see such a person arise.
1
The makes 2 important mistakes. The first is practical - we don't live in an ideal world where scientists and economists communicate directly with voters. There is a layer of commentators, influencers, and prognosticators who shape the 'truth' that the voters hear. These are subject to outside political and economic influence in how they report or distort 'truth'. The author should watch Fox and listen to Rush if he hasn't already. Our democracy is at risk not from the truth or the voters, but from middle-men with an agenda that doesn't align with our common good.
The second mistake is philosophical. It is not clear that the current generation should have the absolute authority to decide on issues that affect unborn or underage persons.
2
And NO there are not multiple truths. There may be variations of truth based on the evidence or soundness of the data, but there are not multiple truths. The earth is not flat, the climate is warming, race is an artificial construct, religion is an artificial construct, evolution is real. These are not really debatable items, but personal beliefs might make one unwilling to accept reality and that is fine as long as we do not stifle reality in favor or belief
10
This is a very good essay. To me it says that as an individual voter I must look for the truth in expert institutions and know that my "understanding" of that truth informs my desires. We all vote for our desires and I must protect the right of my fellow citizens to vote their desires in order to protect my right to vote my desires. And the expert institutions are not to be found in the government nor should the communication from these institutions be dictated by the government. It's up to me to guard each of these.
11
The underlying idea of democratic elections is exactly what no longer exists in our nation thanks to the huge amount of money spent by the Republican Party over the past three decades to distort who is allowed to vote and by our supremely undemocratic Electoral College, one of several ways in which our Founders, radical as they were for themselves, were still highly fearful of the “uneducated.”
Compromise is only possible when opponents actually desire the same goal. We no longer have a Republican Party desirous of democracy unless they have ultimate power of control. You cannot reconcile a couple if one of them no longer actually wants to be married to the other. They will always find a reason to be angry enough to leave but have too much to lose to do so.
Has this author been living under a rock?
5
Mr Harari's prescription for assuring the truth speaks volumes about where we are as a nation, because it is little more than a reiteration of a fundamental truth itself: You cannot build on a weak, unstable foundation. And truth is the foundation of democracy.
Of course, he realizes that what is at stake in our government today is just that, the strong, stable foundation of truth. The Trump impeachment trial is the latest, and certainly the most significant, evidence of the corrosion of this foundation. Whether Trump is or is not guilty, whether he should or should not be removed from office, the truth, to be found in evidence and witnesses, has been made subservient to ideological and political self-interest. The Republican Senate has the right to vote for acquittal, but they cannot vote for whatever truth they prefer.
Or can they? This is the rub. So much of the institutions we depend on are based on people acting in good faith. When the advantages of acting in bad faith with impunity outweigh the advantages of acting in good faith, it doesn't matter what we vote for.
32
@Jim
They would vote to repeal the law of gravity if they thought they had the votes.
2
@Jim You wirte: " When the advantages of acting in bad faith with impunity [desire] outweigh the advantages of acting in good faith, [for what is true]," then the voter needs to be really discerning.
In voting for Trump, the "desire" for supremacy leads to the "truth" being thrown in the garbage bin of time because that is what grifters do with the truth.
1
I really loved this piece and always appreciate Professor Harari's perspective. However, I find this point deeply problematic - "That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights ...when it comes to desire, everybody should be treated the same."
I agree. But as a New Yorker whose blue state vote matters very little - despite representing the views of an increasing majority of Americans - this just doesn't ring true. Of course urban, liberal, younger Americans and people of color are angry! We're being told 10,000 of us equal one person in Wyoming. Maybe if we *actually* had a one-person-one-vote model America would be able to work out its differences without so much animosity and mutual distrust.
111
@Melissa G
Don't forget the incarcerated. Not equal.
2
Excellent analysis as one always expects from Mr. Harari.
The problem here is that of the three entities who can guard our democracy, two are hard to subvert as they are too diffuse. However one, the judiciary, is amenable to capture by a certain ideology.
If this has to be checked and rectified, the life terms of Supreme Court judges must be changed to say the life span of a generation, say 20 years.
A society should not be forced to confirm to the views of an ideology that has managed to capture the judiciary.
Republicans are alarmed at the fast pace of change occurring in American society. They would like to turn the clock back to an age when white men ruled the public as well as the private sphere, when what is said in the Bible trumped scientific knowledge, when entire peoples were deemed inferior and slave-material because they did not measure up to how intelligence was measured by the ruling class.
If America wants to remain a democracy, it will have to solve the problem of capture of the judiciary by any ideology, whether conservative or liberal.
13
Mr. Hariri is a very bright man but I fear that technology has allowed humans to jump a shark we never imagined. There are far more uninformed, under informed or misinformed people than we, as a culture, are willing to acknowledge.
Most highly educated people are not accustomed to being around people that are woefully incurious. Technology is like a bad religion that can spread nonsense exponentially faster than any institution can stop.
The future will be “interesting”
28
@Mary
We have substituted the social media for education. Here we are.
1
@Mary
"Incurious" is a "curious" way to put it.
I would not choose "incurious" to describe one who believed in Pizza Gate.
1
This country has always included people who prefer spectacle over reality. Today that preference is manifest in the WWE, MMA and "reality" TV crowd. The existence of "pay-per-view" indicates that there are actually people out there who are willing and even eager to pay more than $60 to watch, on television, as two gladiators pummel one another into oblivion.
The spectacle that is Las Vegas, and the proliferation of casinos around the country, attests to the fact that far too many people have no idea what is in their own best interests. Do they think that the spectacular venues are financed by all the winners at those casinos?
What has changed in the past few years is the realization that people who prefer spectacle over reality make up such a large part of our population. Even more frightening is the realization that they hold voting majorities in so many states, can dominate the electoral college and that they can be so easily manipulated into voting against their own interests.
It is truly unfortunate that the truth seems to play such a small role in today's elections.
17
Harari’s distinction between wishes/wants and the truth is important, but it also seems to me that our leaders should do all that is possible to urge voters to ask not just “What do I want?” but also “What is best for the nation (or city or state, etc.)?” If we all tried the thought experiment of asking ourselves what we would favor if we didn’t know what place we held in our society (and some humble education to learn the facts wouldn’t hurt, as a force to counteract propaganda), we would come a little closer to the honesty and public-spiritedness that should inform our votes. We would probably still often vote our own interest, but we might become a little more cognizant of a precious concept: reasonable people can disagree. At the present moment, there is a strong tendency on the part of many to deny that two people who disagree can both be reasonable. That attitude leads to demonization and the denial of others’ humanity.
12
Philosophically, this is a wonderful ode to democracy and elections as a mediation of people’s desires rather than an effort to discern truth.
But here’s the problem. We are not a democracy! Except in name. Why? Very simple. Our elections are not just determined by the votes of those Americans who go to the polls this November. Also “voting” are all those who designed and modified a Constitution which was actually built on giving minorities (slave owners and small states) power over the majority. Though we no longer countenance slave-owning (thank god!), nevertheless changes to the Constitution have enabled a system where the Electoral College no longer works as designed and where the Senate no longer does either - due to every state (no matter how large or small) having only 2 Senators - making it possible for a Minority to have taken control of the rest of us.
This imbalance, which is eroding our “democratic” principles, stands counter to everything explained in this lovely Op-Ed, with which I agree - in “principle” - but which is no longer working in America.
And it’s this imbalance which will allow our election and its aftermath, whatever that is, to be turned into a conflagration. If we fail to find workable solutions for the long run.
18
@TheraP
If you think a democracy can survive when all its citizens do is pay taxes and vote, then that democracratic system is doomed.
Every citizen must devote as much time as they can to making "rule of the people", work.
It can be as simple as letting the town know about a pothole, volunteering a couple times a year to pick up trash or at the visitor center, or making sure the sidewalk in front of your home is clear of snow and ice. It could be writing a letter to an editor, donating to your school or library, serving on a commission, campaigning for your candidate of choice, or running for office, yourself.
If the people like yourself, and I, are not involved then our demo-cracy is doomed.
1
@maybemd
Let me say this. I am 75. Retired. In the past I did a lot but now voting is my primary citizen activity.
I do write here and elsewhere. Obviously. And I do alert authorities to problems if I know about them.
Thank you for commenting!
1
It is tempting to want to have governments ruled by some "enlightened philosopher kings" who have an unbroken grasp on the truth. Many see the backlash against expertise with the recent Trump administration and it is beyond frustrating for many academics and experts who have spent years in their respective fields to just be ignored.
However, we know that even experts are just more educated human beings through knowledge and experience at the end of the day. They are imperfect, and much more like the common person than they are not. There is no firm grasp on the truth, just things that are empirically more correct. What we know to be true is just trial and error and the human sense experience that guides us to these theories.
Enjoyed Sapiens, but here I think the Professor’s jumped the shark. Of Brexit referendum he says “That’s a question about desire, and there is no reason to privilege the desires of experts over those of everyone else.”
Isn’t there the very good reason that the decision will have an outcome, a material impact on the well being of the country and its inhabitants?
Yes, a political question is not a true/false proposition, but there are predictable better and worse outcomes. It’s not that experts should dictate, but, if people make their choice based on false notions and in defiance of expert opinion, as they can obviously be convinced to do, you get Brexit—or Donald Trump.
No, we don’t want to restrict people’s right to decide, but such dubious decisions are a problem which a nice distinction between truth seeking and desires compromising does not solve. History has shown that institutions designed to solve the problem can be sabotaged and subverted.
6
@jamiebaldwin
Without a strong educational system and a powerful news media, with something like "fairness" laws, no kind of democratic system can work.
1
Great advise! "...vote for politicians [and a party] who respect the truth..."
Now which one is that?
I certainly don't see either of the two dominant parties as having any respect for the truth. Particularly if one considers selective use of the truth and spin as favoring "non-truth"
1
@Ray "T" said a while back in reference to debates, "I have all the best words!" Enough said?
And another thing: People like Richard Dawkins show the facile nature of their so-called expertise. As the Guardian reported, it is a little known fact that the "Einstein equation"of special relativity, or e=mc^2, was actually first derived by DePretto and Besso brought DePretto's paper to Einstein's attention. (Einstein received massive mathematical help from Hilbert for general relativity as well and some pages of Hilbert's notebooks were defaced and missing.) The truths we commonly think are true sometimes aren't.
4
This is a rather convoluted essay. If we are to have independent referees in democratic society, as you put it, there must be a commonly referable notion of truth. Otherwise people can call fouls that benefit certain politicians. Also, you say that populist regimes appeal to desires, but say that elections are not about truth. If they're not about truth, then they become about desire. This is a shabby framework. Also, your claim that the media will scoop a big scandal if another outlet doesn't is naive. In the real world, many big scandals have gone unreported for years, or only reported on by independent media.
6
Elections in America, political/economic atmosphere,--indeed the culture of America--is primarily not about truth or indeed any high standard in aesthetics/art, but about an artificial reality which holds people together, allows them to function as roughly one people?
Yes, of course. The atmosphere in which the average American grows up is one which flatters average sensibilities, tastes, intelligence, is a constant recycling of the average, repetition of themes in fashion, music, film, etc.--a state where excellences of the past, that which surpassed average sensibility, must be played down, forgotten, so essentially and in actuality, the beat goes on.
This is the exoteric aspect of America and it's so powerful that it's a wonder anyone escapes it, but the more they do the more they become the esoteric aspect of America, the truth/aesthetics/sense behind things, and indeed probably for America to survive at all there has to be a division between the two with the latter firmly in control and subtly raising expectations beyond the average or the average just gets louder, more bored, noisy, repetitious and angry and eventually cannot help but notice it's just doing the same old thing over and over again...
But for now the average seems to be doing quite well, lots of loud explosions in movies, music which is little more than talking/gesticulating at you, clothes louder and more ridiculous than ever...The face of the institutions of America in all their fireworks and glory.
6
As evidenced by the tasteless half- time display at the super bowl game
"They are about finding compromise among people with vastly different desires."
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no willingness to compromise from the right side of the aisle; to them, elections are blood sport that must be won at all costs, and anything resembling "compromise" is viewed as weakness and capitulation. It also doesn't help that some of the "different desires" that they hold involve relegating women, minorities and LGBTQ persons to second-class citizenship and keeping a perpetual underclass underfoot to exploit. The current GOP standard seems to be "My way or the highway" and "crush your enemies." This is not compromise; it's autocracy.
19
Not all citizens in the USA have equal voting rights. The Senate provides much more power to the few while the House is said to provide proportional representation to "the people." "The people" in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton and "The people" voted prior to that for Al Gore. Many GOP, and often, religiously motivated conservative voters here in NYS applaud limiting the power of "the people" because of the myth that "the people" are known to follow pied pipers. Not all "people" follow pied pipers. Today, elections are about power and personality. I fear for the future of my country.
29
Edmund Burke has been resurrected. Now considered a conservative, Burke was considered a liberal back in his day. Burke understood Plato and “balance” (metaxy) was to be understood as essential to all things (not a bad idea).
As with Burke, Harari asks the right questions, but, at least for the contemporary world, gives mostly ideological answers. Half truths do not provide adequate answers to forceful questions.
Nevertheless, this op-ed deserves reading for precisely the questions it raises.
12
"Democratic elections are about human desire,"....But there is a slight problem. How does anyone know what they want. Wisdom is the ability to recognize what is truly in your own best interest. If you find a wallet on the street with a thousand dollars in it, do you take the money or return it to its rightful owner? Do you value a thousand dollars more than you value your own personal integrity? The problem isn't in voting your desire, rather it is understanding what your desire is. Alas, in our society wisdom would seem to be in short supply.
20
Unfortunately, lying to people about how to achieve their desires for economic and community security, and their preferred cultural norms, has become a huge industry in the United States, and its well paid. Hence, for example, Brexit and Donald Trump.
That's why so many of us oppose the Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) equating money with speech, and allowing the extremely wealthy to flood our politics with self-serving lies and distortions. A similar problem exists with corporate media, and Mr. Harari may be overly optimistic about competitors filling in the gaps or correcting the liars.
Democracy depends on preserving multiple power centers and institutions, able to compete, but the increasing concentration of wealth makes that increasingly difficult.
And, Democracy is gravely threatened by not only lies, but "voter suppression" through gerrymandering, restrictions on voters creating mass disenfranchisement, and even our vaunted Senate, with two representatives from each state, both those with 600,000 or 700,000 inhabitants, and those with 15-20 million inhabitants.
Hopefully enough of us will act to restore some semblance of balance in our society.
43
@Russ Almost every point here is wrong:
"lying to people about how to achieve their desires for economic and community security" I would indict Sanders and Warren for suggesting that all would be OK if we just tax (to death) that rich man over there. That is certainly a false promise.
Citizens United allows the rich to buy elections? Well, NO. Money does get one into the game but is hardly decisive, just ask Hillary.
Voter suppression? Sorry, NO. People can vote, and blaming voting hours, registration cleansing, or voter ID is absurd.
1
It's a great argument; inside an Ivory Tower.
Not let's get back to reality. Elections are not about compromise. That's why Trump won in 2016. His platform made not compromises about immigration, tax cuts, restricting abortion, rolling back environmental regulations, and other policies. His supporters loved him for it and their enthusiasm led to his victory.
It's also why he's in a great position to get re-elected. While the democrats fight over Sanders being too far to the left, and Biden being too much of a centrist. The republicans know exactly what they want without any compromises; more of what Trump is giving them.
America is in a state of ideological warfare, the people who will win are those most committed to what they belief in.
15
Thank you for this valuable contribution!
As Dylan said, "There are no Truths outside the Gates of Eden."
4
@Josh
He also said “There is no success like failure and failure is no success at all”.
This blather from the ivory tower, generalizing about how and why we vote, is just too full of itself to persuade me. How about a simple discussion about “right” and “wrong”?
Good luck.
Thank you, YNH: the sort of perceptive and clearly expressed insights that made me recommend your books to everyone I know. Your two key points (a) elections are about desires, not truth, and b) truth is important and we need to protect the institutions that seek that truth) are surely important.
Still, we are left with the problem that even if the truth is "out there", a majority may choose to ignore it or, more likely, be unwittingly persuaded to believe something different from the truth. I'd be interested to know your thoughts on how we deal with problem.
9
I'm unable to determine whether the author is supporting or decrying the idea that elections are more about desires than the truth. Both sides are argued.
I fall squarely on the side of truth and facts being essential to a well-functioning democracy. Democracy is a decision making process whereby citizens choose who will govern them. Making that choice based on falsehoods and fictions results in poor decisions and when those poor decisions run into reality, reality always wins.
That said, an incompetent and untrustworthy person in government leadership will constantly struggle to do their job to the detriment of the voters. Unfortunately, if that person has an entire machine at his disposal that constantly churns out lies that promote his falsehoods, his positions can be maintained...for a while.
10
Somehow I get a sense from the opinion that the media, the academia and the courts are able to clearly separate the desire from the truth. If this were true we would get the same news from MSNBC, CNN and FOX, the supreme court will not end up with 5:4 decisions along the ideological separation lines and the academia would speak with one voice on climate change. We have to accept the fact that all of these referees have biases. They are only human.
6
"That’s why all citizens have equal voting rights."
I could not read past this statement. Obviously the author is talking about a different country if not a different universe.
119
@Len Charlap
Electoral college is a slap in the face equal right of each voter.
8
Agreed. The name of our country should now be spelled Amerika because we have already lost some of our rights and some of our "democracy" through the actions of 45 and his henchmen the Republican Party. Actively culling voters from the rolls, and refusing evidence at a trial that most of the People wanted to hear.
We as a country have already been grievously wounded.
5
@Len Charlap That is true! The author is talking about a different country. The author wrote about a democratic country, not about the U.S. He is an Israeli citizen who studied in the U.K. His English is perfect but he is not an American. There are many democratic countries in Europe but definitely not all. You don't need to travel to a different universe.
2
A horribly flawed set of arguments.
The author lauds facts and truth when he says fundamentalists shouldn't be allowed to dictate things having to do with facts and truth (theory of evolution, etc). Alternatively he says, well, when it comes to politics, truth isn't at play (one shouldn't have to know about economic facts to vote on Brexit).
Since most peoples' lives are much more affected by economic policy than whether the theory of evolution is true, it is more important that economic policy be underpinned by fact than even evolution, for example.
9
Um, I don't see the people of Bangladesh being able to vote on U.S. climate policy. Why should my desires, and those of my fellow U.S. citizens, count for more when it comes to the future of the whole earth than theirs?
The French Gilets Jaunes are famously worried about the end of the month, not the end of the world. And that's fine, as long as everyone threatened by the end of the world gets a vote. But most of the world doesn't.
10
What if the voters pass a law or constitutional amendment to require that all children be taught that there are those who believe the world is flat or worse yet that the earth is flat? How do you reconcile the alleged right of the voters to believe what they want and the obligation of the government not to subordinate the truth to the will of the people? The answer is you can't. People have the right to believe what they want but do not have the right to impose their beliefs on others by letting their beliefs influence or dictate their votes for political leaders or on decisions that affect others.
8
"The government is already the most powerful institution in society"
Really? Many of us believe, esp after Citizens United, that the government has been entirely coopted by corporate interests.
Taken to the logical conclusion then, for-profit corporations are now our "most powerful institutions." US Government is just a lackey to be used to serve corporate needs and goals.
33
@Aerys - As author Anna Wiener in "Uncanny Valley" quotes one techno-titan, "There are no adults in the
White House; we are the government now."
Recognizing that democratic elections are about desires helps our understanding. Simply endorsing the focus on desires does not help our society.
In less partisan times it was hard enough to find compromise and reconcile conflicting desires. Now too many of us desire not just certain policies or for our side to win, and the other side to lose, but to crush the desires of the other side.
Desire is a dangerous ideal. We exclude children from adult autonomy, including elections, because their desires are likely too removed from reality, often irrational, and sometimes mean. What about us "gown-ups"?
5
Nonsense.
Populism is a balanced response to what might be defined as the dominance of the liberal techno-meritocratic elite. It is the real response to a flawed balance between popular soverignty and liberalism. Populist leaders are not anti democratic but they firmly strive to control the harmful consequences of liberal globalization, and obvioulsy they have a real case against experts". They do not want to shape physics chemistry or change Einstein's theory of relativity. They are not Stalinists. Moreoever, they dont even want to prevent Yuval Harari to speak up his mind and be remunerated for that. The more Harari and alike speak up their minds, populists gain more votes. Differently from fascism, populists do not want to destroy the enemy. The existance of the 'enemy' namely 'the elites' contributes to the strength of populism and not the other way around
3
"Their primary targets are exactly those institutions that protect the truth: the media, the courts and the academy."
Really, the media and the courts and the academy protect the truth. Where are you from? I only see partisan politics in the media, courts and the "academy". This president has been attacked since day one by all of your triumphs of the truth. Politics is at a national low in decency as everyone is being lied about and that is sad. I don't know how much worse it will get but assume it will. Trump represents a danger to all those in our government and for good reason. We need to get rid of at least 50% of our current governments nationally to restore our republic to "The People" and remove a lot of useless and costly fluff government.
When you attempt to provide self destructive people with options for their self destructive desires, I am sure that truth does not matter.
Verifiable truth is reality. Basing decisions of governance is the definition of sanity. Making decisions regardless of reality and truth is just self indulgent clap trap.
Some of us have better uses for our time than making excuses for the bad behavior of others.
3
Interesting perspective. The trouble, of course, is that we live in a world where "truth" is much debated and where we have competing institutions offering vastly different versions of the "truth," e.g., Fox News vs the NYT/W.Post etc. While scientists make the informed claim that climate change is an urgent concern and is human caused, the opposition can readily come up with their own scientists who dismiss all of that as invalid. We have an administration which lays claim to "alternative facts" as their truth, questions science, dismisses experts, and re-writes history as it choses. How we separate raw "truth" from partisan perspective at this point is beyond me.
3
@Anne-Marie Hislop - I disagree. It takes a bit of work, but it is not impossible to discover which facts are reasonable and which are not. I am a mathematician. I can prove 2 + 3 = 5, but I cannot PROVE the earth goes around the sun, not vice versa. BUT based on the evidence, the data, it is certainly reasonable to make that conclusion.
Let me give an example. The CBO says we paid $3.65 TRILLION for healthcare in 2018. Based on the CBO's record looking backward, it is reasonable to assume this is correct. They also say that long term medical inflation has been running at 5.25%. That's a bit fuzzier figure since I haven't said over what period. But it certainly seems reasonable. Then I can PROVE that if nothing changes, we will spend over $50 TRILLION on healthcare in the next 10 years. So any estimate of the cost of changes such as M4A should be compared to this figure.
Of course, someone can simply deny the existence of the CBO, but a reasonable person would ignore him.
9
As you speak of evolution in Sapiens , we are evolving, but we have a very long time to go if in this media driven portion of evolution people can not get past a personal bias on all communication. As Buddha was afraid of “ the treacherous sea of words.”
No, we are in a different time where truth has no part of politics at all. This was not always the case. An incident that happened yesterday provided a perfect example. I was sitting in a bar/restaurant watching the game with about 20 people at the bar when Trump's commercial (which strategically included several Blacks) cam on announcing Trump's passion for "criminal justice reform." This is not an exaggeration. Every person at the bar began laughing. They laughed because the claims in the commercial were outright lies designed to deceive and mislead. Everyone knows Trump lies on a daily basis. None of his supporters care. While American political history is replete with horrors, never has truth been so unimportant.
23
"In a democracy voters are perfectly entitled to prefer nationalist sentiments and religious ideals over economic interests." Says who? In a democracy voters have an obligation to exercise their votes responsibly, which includes getting the relevant facts right, and to recognize that how they vote affects many others. Voters have no more right to do whatever they want any more than drivers have the right to run through stop signs or red lights.
But if voters in a democracy ARE entitled to base their vote on anything they desire, including which candidate is the most entertaining or physically attractive, well then you have just made a strong argument why democracy may not be the way to go.
8
We have the same desires — or at least, the same ultimate desires. Among other things, we all want there to be more justice and more joy. We want these things for their own sake. But we have different beliefs. What's the best way to understand justice and joy? And, what's the best way to increase them? We disagree over these questions. We do have different desires, because we disagree over how to fulfill our shared ultimate desires. One voter thinks higher taxes increase justice; another, lower taxes. So, I draw the opposite conclusion. We vote differently because of what we think is true. Not because of what, ultimately, we desire.
2
"if the supreme court’s independence is compromised, the democratic game turns into a majority dictatorship." In the U.S., where the electoral college and the Senate are rigged in favor of the minority, it really will be a minority dictatorship.
35
Elections are about winning one more vote/delegate/seat than your nearest opponent. If that is possible without compromise and by going out of your way to villify your opponents and their supporters, so be it. The current president and his party are testing that premise.
4
I agree with his list of once useful controls but I find the author’s belief that the media have a working self control mechanism to be laughable. Scientists have jumped into the political (cess) pool and voluntarily weakened their long held status as honest brokers, and the political combatants attack the judiciary with gusto. Too many of us get our news from the media with which we agree. If you aren’t getting your information from the wide spectrum available today you are under informed — the days of one source being good enough are long gone.
4
Democracy is only about bestowing legitimacy on those who will govern. If one expects more than that, one is going to be disappointed.
4
I think you forgot to mention that FAIR elections are what you are talkin about. Elections that are manipulated through voter suppression, gerrymandering, denying the right to vote to various classes of people, indirect elections (the Electoral College, for example) often do not reflect the wishes of the electorate. Universal suffrage was very late in coming to the U.S. and still has a ways to go before our elections reflect the will of all the people.
31
I'm sort of in the same place as Kurt Mitenbuler here (see said person's comment below).
This essay rings with academic distinction-without-a-difference, hair splitting that doesn't notice the scalp is diseased. And perhaps Yuval Noah Harari, by hinting at but not decisively acknowledging the way modern media manipulation of the very concept of truth (not just people's beliefs) undermines institutional expertise, doesn't realize how the third section of arguments tends to undermine the arguments of the first two.
Although, it might be argued that logical consistency is SO 20th century.
6
I disagree with Prof. Harari about the truth in the election process. The elections are about truth and about visions and plans for the future, but they cannot be plans that are not realistically feasible.
I cannot help but to reflect on what President Kennedy said at his inauguration about aking what you can do for your country. He was truly an inspirational president, but his goals were feasible, difficult but feasible. Even Johnson's "Great Society" had true potential.
Trump's wall that Mexico was going to pay for and his boast about wiping out the Federal debt in 8 years are the things that experts need to address during the candidacy because the public needs that information to hopefully make an informed decision on who to vote for as president. Finding out after a person is elected is too late.
11
@VMG
What about JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you"? That seems opposite to much modern political campaigning.
3
Elections are like athletic contests and maybe philosophically, death. The fact that eventually you will lose and must accept that loss is what makes you a mature adult and what makes the process interesting and worthwhile. Adults then live their lives accordingly. Only immature children think they must always win and always be right.
4
Elections are about the flow of dark money to pet projects.
We must recognize and change the impact of Citizens United.
23
You're right. But what you do not address is how to keep the government and corporations from suppressing and subverting the truth.
How can the executive branch be prevented from undermining the independent judiciary--one of the key institutions that prevents mob rule majoritarianism, as you say--by appointing radical ideologue judges who, at least implicitly, take orders from the White House--but who, nevertheless, win Senate confirmation?
Regarding another protective institution, the press, if Facebook wipes out all but the largest, most profitable, and most powerful newspapers, how can it continue to perform its function?
And as for the academy, how can it be kept independent even though (except for private schools) it is funded by a government that intends to use it for mind control, submission, and to maintain ignorance?
If you can answer those questions, your argument--which is perfectly valid--would pack a lot more punch.
10
Great articles - thanks; I'm a big fan of Harari's books and wish others would celebrate his conclusions. Distinguishing between truth and desires is important to be sure but very very difficult for most people. Many easily conflate truth with the things they want; Al Gore's "an inconvenient truth" says it all.
The truth though evolves. At one point, the "the truth" was that the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. At one point, we didn't know that hot dogs were unhealthy. At we still don't seem to know the truth about eggs - some experts say they are good for you, others say otherwise.
So it seems to me that even more difficult than separating out truth from desires is to really know the truth. Science and experts can only get us so far at any given time.
9
@deedubs
I disagree. The objective truth does not change, only our perception and understanding. The earth was never flat nor the center of the solar system and universe. People, even a majority may have thought so, but they were factually wrong. Popularity often has little correlation with truth.
5
Wow I couldn’t disagree more. This a vacuous waste of time. It imparts little or nothing informative and gases on in a self important way about the obvious.
Merci Mr Noah Harari, wile reading your column all i could think of was Erdogan encaging Judges, Scholars, Scientist Army Officers only to ensure that there's no opposition to his goal of total control over the Turks and this region of the globe.
23
Excellent, except for one questionable statement. It might indeed be useful for historians -- historians of science -- to weigh in about relativity. Not about the math, but about its language and its history. Such things are relevant in such complex conceptual understandings. This does not weaken the importance or independence of scientific findings; it just adds to the complexity -- something for experts to deal with. And electing the government one likes, depends on whether one is fed and accepts lies about that government -- such as whether Brexit would lead to extra money for the British health services, or whether tariffs are paid for by foreigners.
4
THIS ARTICLE NEEDS A little Greek, to me. The word, "democracy," means "power to the people," more or less. The Founders were students of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. They believed that all problems could be solved logically by informed debate. So, elections do, as everything else, find their own truth. Meaning that if ballots are freely cast, there is an accounting of the preferences of We The People, reduced to a vote count. Because votes to not think; people do (or would do well to do). In the Supreme Court, the facts of cases are brought in, pleaded by attorneys representing the interests of the two parties to a conflict of the interpretation of the law. The verdict, ideally, reflects the opinions of the judges who, presumably, are experts at finding the truth. But that "truth" is a construct of the interpretation of the evidence set before them. Except in cases decided unanimously, in the end, there are members of the Court who interpret the facts differently. Not as they might desire; but as the facts, according to their analysis, determine. In this age of the algorithm, we will be beset by the prevalence of AI (artificial intelligence) where machines will evaluate information about us. In the case of AI software reading Xrays and other images, the machine is more accurate than humans. That is because of the capacity of computers to perform a great many computations in a very short period of time, without fatigue or distraction. Desire or fact?
3
Elections are useful primarily as a means to provide and sustain political legitimacy. The idea that the "will of the people" is a good thing, in and of itself, is illusory -- the will of the people may be bigoted, hateful, misogynistic, homo- and trans-phobic, etc. In and of itself, it is not necessarily a good thing. It needs to be molded, shaped, formed by expert opinion, which itself is based on truth creation entities headed by experts (universities, institutes), otherwise it is just a populist interjection, which as often as not will be illiberal and harmful. The point of elections, therefore, is not to vindicate the will of the people in and of itself, but to provide the political system with legitimacy in the eyes of what will be, in virtually any system, the largely underinformed masses. It is the role of the knowledge elites to shape and mold and police "acceptable opinion" among the masses, however, so that the exercise of democracy as a legitimating exercise produces outcomes that are substantively acceptable from the knowledge point of view.
7
There comes the role of education, mainly basic education for the masses. Public desire preferably should be based on some factual truth and ability to understand few basic logic. If that fails, then our ability to elect any Govt or opine on relatively complex technical issues like economy or environmental (climate change) or health or other policies.
And in this whole issue is overwhelmingly influenced by religion, which must be taken out from our education system if we are serious to saving our democracy.
USA improved on its basic education, mainly public education, since that famous Scopes trial (1920s) regarding teaching evolution in schools. But it changed around early 1980s, though it started around 1976 to be precise, with President Reagan. It also correlates with globalization that exported poverty from developing countries with worsening wealth and income inequality almost everywhere.
Since then US power and global influence started its decline. It ultimately resulted in Trump presidency and public exposure of the growing dark underbelly of our country.
9
You say little about the role of our media companies, which are mouthpieces for advertisers. The corporations that buy those ads control media content, in subtle and direct ways.
An example is reporters' failures to ask questions about global warming in the Democratic debates. That sends a strong subliminal message that it's a minor problem. Similarly, drug companies run constant ads telling us that they can provide erections, sell us consumer items that bring happiness, and present gauzy interpretations of key events.
Maybe you don't bring up this point because you, like many others, depend on our media corporations for income and exposure.
Americans lack courage these days. In the past, we have suffered and died for much less. Time to find our souls, and act accordingly.
8
A very good and timely article but seemingly too late and most likely not to be read widely enough to initiate positive change. Just one of many examples is in the EPA where those people who work in the furtherance of science are no longer allowed to use the terms "global warming" and "climate change". This is just one tiny example of Orwellian thinking come to roost in America where it used to be that "shining light on the hill of truth and justice". It wasn't even the majority of voters who brought on this onslaught of fleeing reality. Sad to say the signs are not encouraging.
6
Serious flaws in Yuval Harari's presentation, that also go to the heart of the flaws with modern western republicanism as well.
1+1=2 is truth. Whether somebody prefers blue or red, or prefers chocolate or vanilla are desires.
Lying in between these two sets of realities is a host of contingent questions we can call prudential judgments. No actual firm objectivity with one true answer, but considerably more than just an arbitrary desire. They call for serious-minded judgment calls on important subjects, which are grounded in key truths about what is good and true.
An election is, or should be, an important prudential judgment, not just a whimsical desire. On that basis, there is an argument to be made that the masses may not be knowledgeable, wise, and trustworthy enough to make important produential judgments.
Going in hand with this, on the other side, is the fact that experts have been gravely wrong too many times to count. When they don't perform well, and become full of their expertise reputation to the extent it becomes a self-affirming dogma, they mess up.
There are firm intellectual reasons to be skeptical about Darwinian evolutionary claims from experts. There are also firm intellectual reasons to be skeptical about climate change catastrophist experts as well.
What to do with all this? Return to the classical Western canon of wisdom, and the fruits of classical Greek and Catholic thought.
3
@Rob I'd love to see you make that argument to a MAGA hat wearing , 50-year-old male owner of a small plumbing business in small-town Georgia. Oh, and he's a Southern Baptist. Especially after he's had a few beers at the local watering hole.
I really would.
@newsmaned
Let's not forget what Isaac Asimov said about the nation:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.”
You have a ten-to-eleven-month election process once every four years. Has there ever been a binding national plebiscite should the president have appeared to warrant impeachment – to determine whether he ought to be replaced with a senior administrator (his deputy)?
1
@M. C. Major There isn't a constitutional mechanism for a national plebiscite. So in order to have one, the states and Congress would need to agree -- that would never happen, so back to square one.
5
The Founders wisely did not have a provision for a national election on anything. The closest is the designated day when the states select their electors for President and the states select the representatives to Congress. We call those days national election days, but they really aren’t. Constitutionally, those are 50 separate elections.
6
It was a rhetorical question –
I am just not sure if the Senate should have been responsible.
Dawkins was right (as was James Madison). Representative democracy is better than direct democracy precisely because our desires at times need to be checked and controlled. A deliberative representative body has the time, resources, and diversity of opinion to carefully consider and debate issues so that reason has a chance of prevailing over passion. The last thing any mature person wants to be ruled by is desire.
9
“When discussing relativity, the opinion of one physics professor counts for far more than the opinion of a thousand history professors or a thousand lawyers.”
How about the opinion of a patent clerk?
In Truth, it isn’t the counting of opinions—qualified a little or a lot—that should matter, but the evidence. Don’t scientific opinions and consensus change over time as new evidence accumulates?
But this is a good column, and his observation about the difference between politics and truth is valid. As is his observation about the dangers of unchecked government.
Of course, who checks the checkers? The media’s ability to recognize groupthink and bias is not encouraging.
8
This column should be reproduced in as many places as possible - Harari has cut though the fears and confusion (intentionally crafted by populist/wannabe autocrats) to a clear understanding of OUR MINDS and DEMOCRACY at this stage of history. Thanks to Harari we now know better why we must strengthen our academic institutions, free press and courts.
And why these institutions - as well as civil society organizations - are the main targets of the scary host of current wannabe-dictators.
13
@Charles
Thanks Chico. We read the Times but we didn't see this. Passing it to my family. Hugs to M.
Go Raps.
Frank
Am I right in concluding that many of the comments can be interpreted to read, "my desire is better than yours"?
The simply stated, understandable arrive seems to reflect a desire to strive for a democracy. It's not easy in the face of the reality that many comment on, but I don't think it should be dismissed.
6
I agree with this opinion. I love Bernie and his supporters' passion and enthusiasm. I worry that in the end they won't be able to build that peaceful coalition necessary to turn out all the voters needed to defeat Trump. We can't leave any votes or voters out, or we will lose. So the question for me is, who is "big" enough to build the coalition?
4
@JDW113
The Sanders campaign, volunteers and donors are one of, if not the most, diverse mix of the populace of anyone running. When you checkout the NYT candidate donor map...Sanders dominates in most all quadrants, all across the country.
Build a coalition...? He/we did it.
Despite what you might hear/read about the online army...it is just that; an online army. Often represented by those not actually affiliated nor fans of, Senator Sanders. Not all of course. Just like any campaign with anonymous supporters, or not online. In real life, one never hears or see's any kind of "violence". Protests, yes. Picket lines, yes. Exuberant people, yep. Peaceful...of course and yes.
Who is big enough to build the coalition?
We are trying. The tent is open and welcoming to all.
Hope more of America joins us, as we will join with them. We can all do this and move America in a better direction.
NotMeUs
2
The author steers free from issues with respect to the way desires of the people are expressed. The 2016 Brexit referendum was (as McEwan wrote in The Guardian) supposed to be 'advisory'. There was also a disastrous misconception on the part of Cameron and the remain community that Brexit had no chance to have a majority vote. Given the extreme impact of Brexit the Cameron government and parliament should have foreseen that a result 'straight through the middle' would leave close to half of the people with their worst nightmare realised. This and other drawbacks of plebiscites that are decided on the basis of a simple majority (and may also have be held on the basis of a small number of people asking for such a plebiscite) are a blunt tool for democracies. Plebiscites that are used for such far-reaching decisions should be avoided. The Netherlands has abandoned them. In addition, for both the UK and the US, their political electoral systems are NOT fair as they do NOT give the same weight to every vote.
6
If 90% of a democratic population is anti-Darwin, there is no way to prevent them having an effect on school boards, Departments of Education, University Boards of Trustees, so they certainly will have an effect on Biology Departments. Mr Harari says it is illegitimate to hold a plebiscite asking "is global warming real?" but seems to say it would be perfectly ok to hold a plebiscite asking "do you want to set policy as if global warming were not real, whatever the consequences?" That would be a legitimate plebiscite , and the result would have to be respected. As the founding fathers, and every advocate for expanded sufferage ever since has always said, if we cannot make the electorate more informed, we are doomed.
149
Great. Here's the BUT in the USA: The Electoral College. The will of the people? Democracy? Hardly.
62
Elections are not about truth, that is true. But per this quote from George Washington, they matter... especially in this day and age as we tilt toward nationalism and play with the dangerous fires very reminiscent of the 1930s which set the stage for global destruction. "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master". Be careful who you hand the reins of power to.
25
Erudite as it can be, Harare is taking us through the travails of democracy, the one we desire it should be and the one that leaves a lot to be desired.
I am touched by the simplicity of the argument but on the other I am deeply concerned that those who know how to manipulate the minds of people, can snatch away the true desires and replace them with the fears that would be the bone of contention; the narrative would be distorted such that what is truly the point on which a plebiscite is sought will be shrouded in the mysteries of how critical are the other alternate questions of existence.
Take India for example and this is so easy to grasp. The desire for a job is no more the issue, who my enemies are and how do we defend against these imaginary ones is a far greater question.
The same could be in United States, with a far bigger share of people with a college degree, but it does not matter; the narrative can be carefully altered to bring in a clash of ideas where the original desire is completely lost.
I am going back to Kenneth Arrows Impossibility Theorem, ranked preference of individual desires, do not lead to the ranked preference of desires of a collective; this cannot be decided by any voting mechanism.
7
The author writes: "That is a question about desire, and there is no reason to privilege the desires of experts over those of everyone else." But that's absurd! Desires are not in general formed independently of beliefs. Typically, what one desires to do is a function of what one believes will be efficacious in bringing about one's ends, and people with knowledge -- experts -- are more likely to be right about such questions. Perhaps some desires are "ultimate", uninformed by our beliefs. But insofar as our desires are shared -- we want a healthy economy, safety, etc. -- those with knowledge will better know what else we should desire (to stay in the EU, to support NATO ) in order to obtain the objects of those shared desires than do non-experts. And even when we have little reason to think our "ultimate" desires are shared, people lacking expertise are likely to have little or no idea what the consequences of acting on their desires are, whereas people with relevant expertise will. What would you rather do: act on the uninformed desires of people clueless as to the consequences of such action, or act on the informed desires of those who have some good idea what will happen if we do? Identifying genuine expertise -- whom to trust about what -- is of course a challenge, as is distinguishing those of good from those of ill will. But the general idea that what experts desire and what the uninformed desire are on par is ridiculous and dangerous.
11
At this moment, elections must be about policy direction, whether on public health, human rights or economic policy. At this dire moment with the planet afire and growing refugee movements afoot, this election must be about climate policy and the ability to stand up to powerful polluting industries.
7
Sadly, election results are not compromises but a path for the winner to have power over the losers. Compromise might come as a part of politics after the election and politics do have at least of smidgen of influence from truth. The article is valuable for emphasizing the roles of institutions and of the media. But, those institutions as well as the politicians are under the strong hand of money. None of this is easy but thinking about the issues as the article prompts one to do is the best start for making society function.
18
This is all absolutely righteous and true. But it also absolutely rings with the tone of a college professor unaware of the world that he’s living in. I’ve read all your books, I continue to reference and consult them when I have questions, but I would strongly recommend you get out into the world and look around. There’s way too many respected institutions, including our most acclaimed universities, working overtime to secure their own profit motives.
42
Thanks for your thoughtful essay. It is a stark reminder of how far down the road to authoritarianism the US has traveled. With the majority of people in the US getting their news from Fox and/or Facebook bubbles; with the judiciary being stuffed with political hacks and accused rapists - some judged unqualified; with Senators willfully betraying their oaths; with a non-independent Justice Department; with active and severe voter suppression and gerrymandering; and with a self-acknowledged corrupt and kleptocratic White House; I fear that the distance separating the US from countries like Russia, Turkey and Hungary is growing less each day. Trump and his accomplices/enablers clearly yearn for the US to fully join the ranks of the illiberal democracies.
I am reminded of your words, "As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it—and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it."(1) I find myself asking what narrative the Dems can use to regain power and save the institutions of the USA. Each faction in the party is seeking their own truth; and meanwhile, the dark, xenophobic, misogynistic and corrupt narrative of the Tea Party has captured the imagination of too many Americans.
The next election could not be more important.
(1) Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (p. 247)
67
The next election, sir, is a plebiscite on whether climate change is real or not. The earth doesn't need us to decide 'truth'. Our future, though depends on the actions we will make soon and that requires putting our country on a path to repair our world. The GOP wants to play coroner, I only hope we elect physicians.
15
In the U.S., all citizens do not have equal voting rights. Mr. Harari's analysis doesn't appreciate factors like the Electoral College, the way two Senators for every state distorts our political landscape, the malicious fact of gerrymandering, not to mention voter suppression efforts, recently given greater stamp of approval by our Supreme Court.
Also, Mr. Harari's last paragraph presents a wonderful possibility, except that citizens are increasingly unable to discern and understand the worth of even basic truths, owing to half a dozen factors.
This is the widening crack in the foundation of democracy that must be repaired. Give us some good ideas for moving ahead with that work, Mr. Harari.
294
@RBW The Iowa caucus is facing a bigger hill than truth. Clinton lost the 2016 election in large part because Russia hacked her emails and instigated conspiracy theories and then FBI director, James Comey, reopened an investigation against her just eleven days before the November election. (Clinton was recently exonerated in the original investigation and in a separate investigation ordered by Trump.)
Four years later, Facebook, Fox News, and right wing media deliberately mislead more than ever and still with impunity. (Since when did the First Amendment protect disinformation aimed to mislead the public?)
Not only will the Democratic candidate need to surmount the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the two-Senator-per-State rule, but worse, he or she will face subversive attacks of every type from an unprincipled opponent. The public needs protection from disinformation but it won’t happen anytime soon. The Democrats must tackle this insidious siege of the election process no matter who the eventual candidate is.
54
@fishergal
Being that truth is being considered.
" Clinton lost the 2016 election in large part because Russia hacked her emails and instigated conspiracy theories", has a lot of untruth...
Clinton and the Democratic Establishment should have blamed less, and tried to think critically and to understand why so many voters who had voted for Obama in 2012. chose to vote for Trump, they would be
3
@RBW So right, RBW. I am sick of experts analyzing the problems to death but completely incapable of providing any solution ideas. Our difficulty today is that one political party believes it has the only right answers and it has the money and the propaganda arms in the right places to persuade just enough people to go along. This means that the only real solution to this democracy death spiral is an overwhelming turnout of voters who go Democratic in November or the possible death of one or more of these “oppositional” leaders.
6
All that sturm und drang finally concluding with the unremarkable admonition to respect the truth revealed by institutions that are dedicated to discovering those truths, and to vote for politicians that do likewise. If only it were that simple.
69
Critical thinking is on the decline, period. This article, while persuasive, has too many tautologies beginning and ending with the will of the people. Could someone direct me to an example of the will of the people actually resulting in an improvement in the living conditions of said people? I think H.L. Mencken called it. We have gotten it good and hard. These vague institutions that are referred to. Are we to trust them as instruments of the people when the only restraints they apply are to people without the power to install their chosen apparatchiks? Academia, it worked once but now it operates as a social signifier, the best of the best generating a new crop of entitled overlords while the rest produce a newly captive and indebted group of young people to be fed into the maw of late-stage capitalism. No wonder socialism, as practiced in Europe, is getting a hard look.
35
@Thomas: Great comment, but don't be so sure we're in "late-stage capitalism". I see this term used frequently. How are you so sure we are in the "late stage"? What is unrestrained capitalism but the game of monopoly? It results in the acquisition of wealth, hence power, in the few and everyone else accepts whatever the few will give them. The favored do well. The less-favored get the crumbs. If some form of democracy makes it through, there can be changes but mostly around the fringes because the powerful still make the laws. Personally, I think we're in the early stages of unrestrained capitalism and it's what we do NOW that will determine what the later stage or stages will look like.
6
@ Richard Winkler Yes, but the vocabulary to describe our economic system has been limited intentionally to leave us with inadequate terminology, one that presents us with an unnecessarily binary choice. Selling the rope to hang themselves and us along them might suit on a more visceral level.
Not sure I agree. This country has been electing it's own truth for so long that we're not even sure what the truth is.
25
Elections are not about compromise, at least in the US. They're about one side winning, and the other side losing. If they were about compromise, we would use some system of proportional representation to choose legislators, and we would have the executive branch be headed by an executive council rather than by one individual. Or at the very least, we would use some kind of ranked-choice voting system where the second-choice preferences of a sufficiently large supermajority could outweigh the first-choice preferences of a sufficiently small plurality.
185
@dsws 'Elections are not a method for finding the truth. They are a method for reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people'.
7
@dsws Harari writes about democratic elections, not American presidential elections. Our elections are antiquated from times of 'horse and buggies'. Electros were needed to transfer the election outcome from the states to the capital. As a result we have now a minority President who was confirmed despite that he got 3 mln votes less than his opponent.
4
Thank you for clarifying the roles of truth and desire in politics as well as defining a clear line that we should ALL, no matter our desires, work to defend. We must defend truth and the institutions which do their best to provide and protect it. We must equally defend the desires of disparate people who have a right to speak and have their votes counted. Democracy is a beautiful and wondrous mess of human fulfillment. Its structure, its bones if you will, must be constantly checked and maintained or it won't be able to hold up the flesh that eats its vegetables in order to gorge on chocolate chip ice cream.
2
I do not agree that governments are the most powerful institutions. Corporations are the most powerful institutions.
Corporations control and direct governments to do their bidding worldwide. Large corporations are wealthier than many governments. Corporate monopolies are able to harness the economic, environmental, military and labor resources of countries to benefit their corporation with no regard for people or governments.
Refusal to see the diaboloical nature of global corporate monopolies is a major failure in your essay.
256
@June
Your truth is correct and gross oversimplification simultaneously to portray "reality" in such fairly narrow frame of references. Of course, Corporations ARE people in many layers I may add about this theme. There are shareholders, management whose only fiduciary duty is to generate the profits and implement board of directors agenda, spruced by regulators and lobbyists revolving doors between government and private sector to permeate USA institutions arrangements.
Having typed that, none of corporations possess any inalienable rights that have been according to the laws for now still reserved to actual legal human beings rather than "legal fiction" concept in NA system. Corporations may have their labels trademarked in all countries where such legal structure allows for it(everywhere except NK on earth) while for all practical necessities must comply with sovereign government states to create subsidiaries in order to operate abroad rather than by charter proclamation, the way British used to practice in occupied and controlled territories globally. Now it is done much more civilly, based on the laws and governments (which are also merely people) must authorize their operations rather than accept terms of business unilaterally, dictates absence overtly in their influences.
3
@June
Your truth is correct and gross oversimplification simultaneously to portray "reality" in such fairly narrow frame of references. Of course, Corporations ARE people in many layers I may add about this theme factors to register it. There are shareholders, management whose only fiduciary duty is to generate the profits and implement board of directors agenda, spruced by regulators and lobbyists revolving doors between government and private sector to permeate USA institutions arrangements.
Having typed that, none of corporations possess any inalienable rights that have been according to the laws for now still reserved to actual legal human beings rather than "legal fiction" concept in NA system. Corporations may have their labels trademarked in all countries where such legal structure allows for it(everywhere except NK on earth) while for all practical necessities must comply with sovereign government states to create subsidiaries in order to operate abroad rather than by charter proclamation, the way British used to practice in occupied and controlled territories globally. Now it is done much more civilly, based on the laws and governments (which are also merely people) must authorize their operations rather than accept terms of business unilaterally, dictates absence overtly in their influences.
@Viatcheslav I Sobol: Your analysis misses the central source of corporate power in modern America: "He who has the power writes the laws." Yes, corporations are made of people. But those people are allowed to hide behind a legal shield. They risk other people's money. They can rationalize any behavior in the pursuit of profit. They have an outsized say in the laws and regulations that enforce them and, like totalitarian regimes, they justify all of the above by declaring: "It's legal".
59
A better view of what elections are is to consider the choosing of an alpha male in a pride of lions. It is complex and even more so for the alpha male (or female) of the human herd. Certainly individual strength is a factor in mono to mono competition but this really is a litmus test for likely success as a predator later bringing down game. Maybe this correlates to leadership qualities that help in group hunts. Individual affiliations (sometimes blood) are also key. The net that should emerge is our alpha-male leader is determined by what the collective thinks is our best chance at biological success. A premise in elections is a plurality of opinions knows best -- likely because of individual strength and good affiliations.
With humans, not in animal kingdoms, trust seems a strong factor and likeability. These are not easily seen in a pride of lions.
Certainly behind interest in an election is needs -- the needs to eat, sleep, and comfortable exist. Are these desires? Well I guess. It is more complex. It is a mysterious net of things.
Certainly the back story for democracy is that a sufficient level of civilization has been accomplished that allows for brainier types to rule things and for an election to be possible. You need the infrastructure (voting booths) and a level of education (reading and writing) to be extant. The collective needs to be sufficient large so local (blood line) control is no longer possible. Instinctual controls recede.
The issue I have with the peer-reviewed discussion is that while it may help prevent fake results from being published, it has also led to only publication of ideas that the reviewers see fit.
So many people love to say they are in the party that believes "science is real", but yet they do not question whether there is full representation of all scientific findings in publications. They are willfully blind to the fact that very few studies actually get published and most are selected because a journal has decided it is a topic that will increase their standing in the academic community.
7
Ten media companies controlling most of the professional news delivery and staffed by closely related people who attended the same colleges. No reason not to trust the news or academia. And Mr. Harari couldn't be allowing personal bias and self interest to influence his opinion of Populists. A lot of reasonable arguments with some self-serving conclusions mixed in.
13
@Michael Green 'To make matters even worse, we are now seeing the rise of populist regimes that first gain power by inciting hatred against foreigners and minorities, and then systematically attack any institution that might limit their power. Their primary targets are exactly those institutions that protect the truth: the media, the courts and the academy. Populist regimes fear the truth because it doesn’t obey them, so they claim it doesn’t exist. The typical populist leader flatters people by telling them that the only thing that matters is their desires. Experts who point out inconvenient truths are rebranded as traitors who oppose the will of the people'.
Yes, I think you are right. Whereas the charge is 'incitement', such movements are probably taking advantage of passions long in play with a significant portion of the electorate, among those many that have not felt issues are being decided on the basis of truth by the media, the courts and the academy.
It seems as well that non populist power groups are equally allergic to inconvenient truths.
I don't know whether the cause of compromise can be served by this piece. Would the media, for example, benefit if public policy questions were framed as agenda items that require striking a balance between responsible constraints and present needs rather than a passionate debate on prophetic dangers?
1
A reasoned argument with a dystopian prediction. Hacking humanity may yet be an unattainable fantasy, as we (humans) adapt to the challenge. This is my desire. And for the sake of my family, community, and country, I hope it's the truth.
6
@Mike
This will happen in a manner that people will not be aware or discern comprehensively about such alterations and mistake it for their "own free will choices" to make decisions being merely illusions to maintain reasonably placated citizenry environment.
We are ancient animals and hackable due to evolutionary " cognitive luggage" to saddle our mentalities even with rudimentary psychological primitive tricks unless are knowledgeable about these facts to revert into less susceptible but hardly entirely impervious to manipulation techniques characters.
6
@Mike
This will happen in a manner that people will not be aware or discern comprehensively about such alterations and mistake it for their "own free will choices" to make decisions being merely illusions to maintain reasonably placated citizenry environment.
We are ancient animals and hackable due to evolutionary " cognitive luggage" to saddle our mentalities with external parameters pollution even with rudimentary psychological primitive tricks, external modules of "consolidated" realities unless are knowledgeable about these facts to revert into less susceptible but hardly entirely impervious to manipulation techniques characters.
@Mike
This will happen in a manner that people will not be aware or discern comprehensively about such alterations and mistake it for their "own free will choices" to make decisions being merely illusions to maintain reasonably placated citizenry environment.
We are ancient animals and hackable due to evolutionary " cognitive luggage" to saddle our mentalities with external parameters pollution even with rudimentary psychological primitive tricks, prone to external modules of "consolidated" realities imposition unless are knowledgeable about these facts to revert into less susceptible but hardly entirely impervious to manipulation techniques characters.