Episode Summary
Politics in the United States and everywhere else has always been about policy—which party wants to do this, which party wants to do that. But in the 21st century, a new dimension has been added: true and false.
That reality has become a serious problem for left-of-center political parties, because they have traditionally oriented themselves around an affinity for science and reason.
As a result, right-wing parties with policies that are inherently anti-populist—policies that take money from the middle class and the poor and give it to the rich—are nonetheless able to get the votes of many lower- and middle-income people. Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and a host of other right-wing authoritarian leaders are proof that this is indeed the case.
We’re going to talk about these questions in today’s episode with Eric Oliver, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. He argues that American politics has become divided along epistemic and psychological grounds between “intuitionists” who think with their guts and “rationalists” who prefer science and logic.
Originally the divide between the two epistemologies cut across political partisanship, but since he came along, Trump seems to have attracted the support of former Democratic intuitionists like Robert Kennedy Jr., a trend that Oliver and his co-author Thomas J. Wood all but predicted in their 2018 book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics.
You can also check out his podcast, 9 Questions, which will soon be distributed additionally via the Flux podcast network.
The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
02:19 — The intuitionist and rationalist spectrum
07:04 — Intuitionism was originally cross-ideological, but Trump consolidated it
11:47 — Intuitionism in everyday life
15:24 — How to measure intuitionism vs. rationalism
17:42 — Where Moral Foundations Theory falls short
28:21 — How views about everyday scenarios can correlate with political opinions
33:40 — Democrats' epistemic disadvantage countering Trumpian intuitionism
38:52 — Case study: Lucy's contradictory beliefs
43:16 — Conspiracy theories existed long before the internet
46:05 — Conservatism vs. reactionism
57:03 — Democrats are perceived as the status quo party
01:00:44 — How intuitionism fueled conspiracy theories during the Covid-19 pandemic
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: The book here we're talking about today is not a newly released one, but on the other hand, I think that what you guys put into it and your general thesis and research, it really did accurately describe the phenomenon of Trumpism and the enduring popularity of it.
J. ERIC OLIVER: This didn't start as a book on Trump. It actually started as a book on conspiracy theories. So, um, a few years earlier I had started doing research on conspiracy theories. I had some room on a survey and I put some items on, 'cause I had a long interest in conspiracy theories and came back with these very large percentages of Americans who were endorsing conspiracy theories.
And this is in the early mid two thousands that. These data were coming in. And my co-author, Tom Wood, was a graduate student with me at the time. And I said, wow, we're getting back these crazy numbers. Let's see what's going on here. 'cause is this measurement error or is this really something that's kind of floating beneath the radar, at least a political science. And so we started doing more research into why people believe in conspiracy theories and to the extent that they do. And the two things that kept. Popping up again and again we're kind of what we would call magical thinking, so having a lot of paranormal and supernatural beliefs as being a very big predictor of whether or not people believed in conspiracy theories.
So if you believe in UFOs or ESP or even general sense that there is a God who will respond to your prayers, you're far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than not. Sort of across the board. And what we also found was that people who believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to believe in a host of other [00:04:00] kinds of things.
Like, for example, natural medicines. Homeopathy. Uh, they tended to be more nationalistic in their orientations. They were a lot more populist in their orientations, just generally mistrustful of elites and sort of established groups. They often tended to be wary of foreigners and more xenophobic.
And so we saw this kind of interesting constellation that seemed to defy normal ideology and it didn't necessarily align with race or even partisanship yet. It was this factor that really explained a lot of how people are understanding the world. And so we're in the process of doing all this research, this is 20 14, 20 15. We're fielding survey after survey to kind of generate all these data and who appears on the political horizon, but Donald Trump and he is emblematic of a lot of the things that we're studying.
And what we, we came to realize was that with the popularity of Trump and this welling ground swell, um, around him in 2015, that American politics weren't simply divided by ideology or partisanship or race, but there was another dimension.
And we ended up labeling this dimension kind of intuitionism. And most people are in the middle on this, but you can imagine the intuitionism dimension is anchored on two poles. On one side are people we call rationalist, and those are people who are products of the enlightenment. They believe in science, reason, logical deduction, empirical fact. And on the other end of this spectrum are people we call intuitionists and they believe in gut feelings, um, their own kinds of just intuitions about things. How they're very susceptible to feeling as a guide to understanding the world as opposed to say, for example, maybe thinking. Um, and they place a lot of weights and [00:06:00] then, inferential weight on their own feelings.
And so what we found out and what we were, we were, we were speculating about was that this dimension can divide and kind of describe the American population and how far you are on one end of the other of the spectrum. We'll say a lot about your political beliefs, especially your willingness to subscribe to conspiracy theories to, and, you know, believe in homeopathic medicine to be hostile to vaccines, uh, to be more populist in your political orientations. And so we were devising scales to test this out, and when Trump entered the election, we started doing polls around, around testing these measures during the campaign. And sure enough, like his supporters scored really, really high on our measures of intuition. And so, uh, we ended up writing this book called Enchanted America, and it's really trying to describe what we think is this other dimension that organizes political thinking in the United States.
Intuitionism was originally cross-ideological, but Trump consolidated it
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's, I mean, fundamentally the division is epistemic rather than ideological. And I think the intervening years since you, you two published the book, only made the thesis even more, visibly accurate. Especially I think with the, the migration of Robert Kennedy Junior into the Trump coalition.
I mean, that was almost, you know, you, you guys basically kind of methodologically predicted that that would happen in, in your research and in the findings that you.
OLIVER: Yeah. You know, the, the thing that really struck us about this was that you know, at the time in particular, intuition is cut across ideology and party. And I had a sabbatical year, uh, back in Berkeley where I had done my PhD and I was surrounded by a lot of very, very liberal people who are very strong [00:08:00] Intuitionist, for example.
And you could see this a lot in sort of their opposition to vaccines and traditional medicine. And the idea of really, and, you know, their, their apprehensions about corporate power their fetishizing this idea of something as being natural. And the interesting thing is they have that a lot in common with if you, when I would go to Texas to visit my family a number of whom are evangelical Christians, and they share a lot of the same beliefs. And you know, really, and that was kind of surprising to me. It's like, oh, okay. The Berkeley hippies and the Evangelical Texans have some strong commonalities here, and particularly around questions of, of health, of seeming, naturalism and a real susceptibility to conspiracy theories too.
And, and these people were really what we would call kinda strong intuitionist. And so when I was thinking about sort of the political scene, it was inevitable to me that Donald Trump would probably draw into his orbit, not just people who believed in conspiracy theories, but probably a lot of people on the left who. Share this kind of strong intuitionist proclivity. And it's not that surprising to me, for example, that a lot of people who were formally, enchanted by Bernie Sanders when he didn't get the nomination, then switched over to Trump. Because Bernie tapped into a lot of those types of things that Trump, uh, those sentiments.
There's some big differences between Bernie supporters and Trump supporters, by and large, but at least in some dimensions, especially this sort of political populism that is often embodied in intuition is uh, there, there was a strong commonality there. I,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, and yeah, and, and you guys did find that the Bernie Sanders supporters that you had surveyed did have a strong support for science. And if I remember right, they were the, the most strong supporters of science. Wasn't that right?
OLIVER: well, I think, I think this is what, what's what separates a populist from a socialist and you, you can imagine that. [00:10:00] Populism is, the way we define it really aligns on three dimensions. There's kind of what we would call political populism, which is, uh, real mistrust of political elites and people in political power. There's what we would call, there's a cultural populism, which is mistrust of dominant cultural institutions and apprehensions about dominant cultural institutions. So, fear of Hollywood fear, fear of the media these types of things, um, medicine in that regard. And then there is strong nationalism. That's a big element within populism. And the interesting thing is, bernie supporters and Trump supporters both had very, very strong political populism scales, but where the Bernie supporters broke away from the Trump supporters was on the cultural populism. And, you know, particularly their embrace of science, and they're not nationalists, socialists don't tend to be nationalists.
They tend to be more internationalist in orientation, whereas populist, um, tended to be much more, much, much more strongly kind of nationalist in their orientations there.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. And, and it's also, and, and you do, you guys do talk about in the book that it, it, there's also more of a fearful orientation. and as an example would be somebody like Joe Rogan, who is, seen, he is constantly talking about various things, and he's afraid of, even though he has the image of being a tough, macho guy, he's constantly afraid of in his food.
Or, things that, uh, he think can, can hurt him in, you know, in the air or, you know, fluoride or things. These are all things that, that you, that have a, sort of intuitive fear of things he doesn't understand.
OLIVER: Yeah.
Intuitionism in everyday life
OLIVER: And, and maybe this is a good opportunity for me to describe what I mean by intuition is here, because it's, that's since this is sort of the central focal point, because what we were trying to do is try to figure out what what was underlying all of this, these [00:12:00] beliefs, why were the same people who believe in conspiracy theories also tending to be more populist or, um, more afraid of vaccines and all of these things.
And, and so with this, this idea of intuition is based on kinda a long anthropological literature on magical thinking. And within this are sort of two key elements. When people draw on their intuitions to make inferences about the world, there are two key components that are gonna influence the way that epistemology works.
And so one of them is gonna be their emotions. And so they're gonna utilize their beliefs to both manage their emotions. So if they are feeling fearful and they're feeling anxious, they're gonna look to those beliefs that will help kind of quell that anxiety, but they're also drawing on those emotions to inform their beliefs.
And in the book I describe a story when my son was little and he was awoken in the middle of the night with, terror about, you know, monsters in the closet. And we went back and forth and back and forth, and finally he said, well, dad, you know, if there are no monsters in the closet, then why am I afraid I. And that's really a strong intuitionist proclivity. Children are big intuitionist thinkers. They don't really, they haven't been trained in rational thinking yet. So if you wanna really know how intuition is works, look at your kids. And their kids really draw on their emotions as informative of their realities.
And someone like Joe Rogan does too. I think he's a guy who lives in a lot of fear. And, you know, both in terms of then his ideology, but you know, also his like performative masculinity. This need to like bulk himself up and, you know, and assume this like, like that he needs to be capable in some case because there's some threat that's imminent that's about to face him. The other thing to know about our intuitions is that they have a grammar that organizes them. So if you look at why certain kinds of magical beliefs hold the forms that they do it's because they reflect what are in our sort of innate judgment routines and psychologists have a word for this called heuristics and heuristics [00:14:00] are these kind of information shortcuts that we use to make quick decisions about the world.
And so I'll give an example of this, like, I am in the wine store. There are lots and lots of wines to buy. I don't know which one is a good one. I'll typically just buy a wine from what is the emptiest rack because. That seems like, oh, a lot of other people are buying the wine. It must be a good wine. I assume that they know something. I don't. I'll buy it. That's the ex, that's an example of a heuristic. We have a lot of natural heuristics that shape our psychology. So for example, we have a heuristic around contagion. We are extremely, extremely sensitive to any kind of cues of contagion. And you can see this a lot in political rhetoric where, you know, you can say aliens are invading our borders and despoiling our lands.
And that really taps into that kind of political taps into this, this heuristic of. Anything that's contagious is like a cootie. Oh, is yucky. Has to be kind of avoided. We also have, uh, what psychologists call a representativeness heuristic. So we think that things that look like one thing have the same qualities of the thing that they look like. So you can give someone an ambiguous symbol, and if it looks more like a spider, if it's spidery shaped, people will think it's a lot more dangerous than if it's like coconuty shaped. And so what we did was there are these emotions and there are these heuristics that tend to sort of, drive intuitionist thinking.
How to measure intuitionism vs. rationalism
OLIVER: And we were like, well, can we measure a proclivity toward intuition? Is that doesn't rely on existing existing beliefs in and of themselves. And so we came up with some scales that tried to capture this and I'll, I'll, I'll share some of them because they ended up being pretty colorful. Like we asked people for example, would you rather, um. Stick your hand in a bowl of cockroaches or stab a photograph of your family five times with a sharp knife. Or would you, um, rather yell out loud, I hope I die tomorrow, or read, or, [00:16:00] or travel in a speeding car without a seatbelt. And what we were doing with these measures was trying to give people a trade off between something that had a, a tangible cost.
Like, you know, sticking your hand in the bowl of cockroaches, or the physical danger of riding without a seatbelt versus something that had a symbolic cost, um, which is like stabbing the photograph or yelling a curse, something like that. And what we think is that, you know, intuitionists are much, much more sensitive to these symbolic costs because of their emotional toll.
So, you know, stabbing a photograph of your family, you know, it's just a piece of paper. But in, for a lot of people that feels like they're harming someone by doing that. Um, and, and Intuitionist, really fall into that. We also tried to measure people's, you know, sense of anxiety that they carry, carry around.
Like, um, did they believe that a terrorist attack was imminent or that recession was imminent or war was imminent? And so we had sort of this kind of pessimism scale around that. And so we, we put these things together into what we, uh, described as an intuition scale, and it ended up being a very, very strong predictor of people's belief in conspiracy theories, their populist orientations their belief in natural remedies their opposition to vaccines, the whole really, the whole constellation of things that we were seeing in our survey data.
And there was this underlying dimension that really seemed to capture them all. And so we, we came away thinking, oh, this, I think we've, we've got something here. This is actually something that's, we can find in surveys again and again and again. Um, and seems to be pretty evident in the population. And then I have to say the. Politics of the past 10 years have just really validated what we found, kind of, in 20 15, 20 16 in our surveys.
Where Moral Foundations Theory falls short
SHEFFIELD: One of the things that I was struck with when I was reading the book is that there are a lot of concepts that you talk about in terms of, intellectual and psychological development in terms of intuitionism and rationalism that parallel, uh, a lot of the research and developmental psychology.
But [00:18:00] there also are, I mean, fundamentally this is a moral dimension in a lot of ways, not just cognitive or epistemic. And so there's some, you know, there's some overlap not just with, uh, the, the developmental stuff, but also with research by people like Jonathan Height and, uh, other of some of his collaborators.
OLIVER: Yeah, I, it's funny 'cause Tom Wood, my co-author and I wrote a paper that was critiquing, uh, John Height's work on kind of moral foundations. And just to reiterate I. I before his most recent set of set of books kind of around the anxious generation and the coddle generation and all this sort of stuff, had had a very popular idea that, you know, liberals and conservatives were di divided by these kind of strong, what he said, moral foundations, which were these innate proclivities around concerns of, you know, liberals tend to really be oriented around concerns of fairness and caring. And conservatives were really oriented around, you know, concerns of, of purity and authority and
these types of things. And,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
OLIVER: Our, our problem with, with that formulation, at least in the way that he was measuring it, was that once you took into account people's religious beliefs, those differences vanished.
That what he was prescribing as something that was innate, as an innate difference between liberals and conservatives was really just a function of their religious beliefs as far as his measures, measures go. But I think I. And in engaging with, with Jonathan Height's work on that. Which was very stimulating for us.
It helped us kind of reframe our own understanding about what we think intuitions are, which is intuitions being drawn from emotional proclivities and the reliance on these heuristics, these kind of inborn heuristics. And so once again, like, you know, children tend to be very, very intuitionist in their thinking.
They tend to, like, for example, anthropomorphize their stuffed animals or, you know, make believe that there are these hidden forces that are out there. Understanding the world. I mean, children are just natural conspiracy theorists. We can, we can think of that way. And then, you know, what happens to greater or lesser extents that as we get educated, we move out [00:20:00] of that epistemology and we, we learn alternative ways or we don't learn alternative ways of understanding the world. And so I. I, I think that's a probably, it's, that's that kind of way of describing it is much more in line with what the psychological literature would suggest as opposed to suggesting that there are these kind of innate moral proclivities that we have that differentiate that, that can now explain the sort of our ideological differences.
The, the fact of the matter is, you know, most people are very concerned with fairness. And most people are actually very concerned with purity too. That
SHEFFIELD: express it in different
OLIVER: they just express it in different ways and understand it in different ways. And that, and that's and, and so that in of itself is not necessarily gonna be predictive of, I think, ideologies.
And I think the other thing to, to important to remember here that ideologies are social constructs. They're basically, they're groups of, thinkers and intellectuals who are trying to amass political power by building political coalitions. And the way they do that is sort of say, okay, you know, like, say, take for example the right, right now, and I could do the same thing with the left. Why is a political movement that's so preoccupied with the sanctity of life and preserving life, tolerant of having weapons of mass destruction, IE you know, semi-automatic weapons or automatic weapons in this populace. And the, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that this is a way of bridging this coalition of, gun enthusiasts and, evangelical Christians.
And there's overlaps between those groups. But those, you, you would think that those are inconsistent, beliefs and in some kind of rational way they are. But you know, you could put them together and, and, you know, build an ideology around that. And you could say that, find the same thing on the left too.
Uh, there, there are a lot of seeming contradictions in, in liberalism or the sort of liberal, what we call liberal ideology in the United States as well. And it's just a faction of a function of, of you, you try to build [00:22:00] together a political coalition and then you try to give some archy overarching belief system to it.
But, oftentimes it's pretty flimsy, uh, in its orientation.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, I think that's right. And, and the other thing about the moral Foundation's theory of, of height is that, three of his, his axes are basically the same thing. And he's, and, and so in other words, the, the three additional axes are, loyalty, betrayal, authority, subversion, sanity sanctity degradation.
But those are all the same thing,
OLIVER: Right.
SHEFFIELD: It's all expressions of, of, of ingroup loyalty. And whether you view, uh, certain things as a, of a violation or unnatural
OLIVER: Well, and
and the.
SHEFFIELD: the categories aren't, oh, I'm sorry. And, but, and the categories themselves are, are, there's no basis in the empirical research that these things exist.
That, and as you said, that, they're, they're just kind of arbitrary, frankly, that they're, they're looking at epistemic outputs and presuming that they are inputs, I think.
OLIVER: Well there, there are also a lot of code words that they use in their survey measures that I think tap into. Um, you know, you might say all these epistemic proclivities, particularly amongst like orthodox or evangelical Christians, um, to, to, oh, these are, keywords for them. 'cause this, this is something that's within the rhetoric of their belief systems.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I, yeah, that's a great point because, you know, just going back to what you were saying about like with sacredness, that if the surveys that they had constructed, used language that was meant to evoke sacredness of things that people on the left view is sacred. So like, racial equality or something, you know, or, or, um, ju just gen, you know, general things like that or, or like like that is in the survey.
And then there's also not even an access about, I. which is, like, I mean, you look [00:24:00] at, uh, whether it's conventional liberalism of the Adam Smith variety or, the various 19th century people or even Karl Marx, I mean, left centered ideologies claim to be centered. Uh, and that, you know, even going so far as Marx, you know, to have the scientific socialism.
And so a fundamental value of a left centered, uh, you know, of, of, of a left epistemology or political ideology. And it's not even there,
OLIVER: Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: within, the moral foundations, which is just, it's, it's, it's so contradictory. I feel like.
OLIVER: yeah, yeah. But I, you know, I, I think people are talking, you know, these, these, kinds of frameworks. Come Inish waves. And I think that's gotten a lot of attention. I I haven't seen a lot of research that has gone forward with this. It, it seems to, I mean, Heidi is himself has moved on. He's now, you know, writing bestsellers, so
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. On other subjects. Yeah. and,
OLIVER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: and, and, that's a good point because and I think perhaps one of the reasons for that is that people actually did to apply these concepts. So was, uh, some anti-Trump, uh, groups that were very well funded, created a series of ads trying to criticize Donald Trump as violating of these so-called binding moral values.
And none of the ads worked.
OLIVER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: which suggests that there is something that is much deeper than allegedly foundational beliefs.
OLIVER: Yeah. '
SHEFFIELD: cause literally it's never worked that just simply. Uh, you know, trying to reframe I ideas that are, are, are opposed by Trump supporters in language that they allegedly believe in.
doesn't work. And so what that means is that we have that there is more of a, that, that is more of an epistemic endeavor rather than an ideological or even a [00:26:00] value-based endeavor.
OLIVER: Yeah. And, and I think the other thing that's important to notice about this is that you know, our, our political beliefs are pretty core for people. And one of the things that, uh, came out within political science by, uh, a political scientist at Pen named Michelle Margolis, who wrote a really great book a few years ago, uh, from Politics to the Pews is what's called, and what she basically found was that people are much more likely to switch their church than their political party. So if I, if I have a set of political beliefs and I go to church and I don't like what the minister is saying, I'll find a different church. And it, it's much more likely to happen that way than the other way around. And so, you know, the ability to sort of, um, people's political opinions tend to be kind of, you know, resistant to a lot of, kind of counter programming, so to speak. And I, I, I, I want, I suspect that might've been the, the fault or the value of some of these anti-Trump ads is not sort of recognizing what was really going on in terms of, like why, like, for example, you know, like this is one of the things we bring up in the book. Like why is it that there are these evangelical Christians who are so enthusiastic about a political figure who himself seems to adhere to none of their beliefs? In terms of just, one of the least Christian kinds of people you can imagine in terms of his, you know, there's no modesty, there's no charity. Um, there's just,
SHEFFIELD: explicitly says he doesn't He doesn't, he doesn't know any of the scriptures. Obviously. He
OLIVER: yeah,
SHEFFIELD: Corinthians so
OLIVER: yeah, yeah, yeah.
SHEFFIELD: doesn't know the Bible at all.
OLIVER: Right, right. And, you know, and that, that was, you know, to me, like one of the great sort of mysteries. And I, I think what it, what it speaks to is the fact that he is actually speaking in a language that they understand and it's, you know, it's a language of dichotomies, of right and wrong, of good and evil, [00:28:00] of, imminent apocalypse. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, imminent rapture. Only in in him, in this case, he's the savior. And, and he puts himself in that role. And, you know, his, his ability to sort of, and I think it comes from, 50 years of relentless self-promotion in some ways and learning what works and what doesn't work.
You know, particularly for certain groups of people.
How views about everyday scenarios can correlate with political opinions
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think it might be a little counterintuitive still though, for people to think that how can there possibly be, I. A correlation of somebody not wanting to stab a photo of their family or to say, I hope I die tomorrow with their political viewpoint.
So let, let's delve into that a little bit deeper if we could.
OLIVER: Sure. So I think this comes up a lot when I, when I give talks on the, on the book. And if you look at most of human, uh, American history, I would say that I. This kind of intuition is, would be orthogonal to traditional ideology. And so far as you would have a lot of people who would describe themselves as conservative or as liberal who were a rationalist.
And you would have the same numbers who would describe themselves as intuitionists. And so I think if you, even if you go back to like the 1960s, 1970s, uh, you'd find plenty of intuitionists on the left. And, you know, conservatives at that time often prided themselves on their rationalism too. I mean, you can look at the history of conservatism and say there was, you know, this John Bertan, John Burch society, kind of, barry Gold, watery kind of
intuitionist constituency but, mainstream conservatism at least up and through the nineties and two thousands, probably culminating in George W. Bush, was definitely a, you know, a rationalist movement and prided itself on its rationalism compared to those, weak carded liberals, you know, who are always doing things e emotionally speaking.
And what's interesting is how that's shifted particularly in the past 10 years. And so, for example, uh, here in IDE Park, which [00:30:00] is a pretty liberal neighborhood where I live, you can walk around and you can see these signs that liberals put up in their yards. And it's this laundry list of things that liberals believe in.
Like, we believe that science is real, that, you know, uh, all people deserve love that, you know, it's a, it's a laundry list of this very rationalist way of. Ordering their, their political ideology. And then you can go to areas where, people put up Trump signs and they tend to be very symbolic and they tend to be very fraught.
And to me what's interesting is how, what was a dimension that I think in some ways. Was not peripheral to American politics, but not necessarily a, a major explanatory of American politics has become more predominant and this, this, and that's because conservatism has tilted much, much more towards an intuitionist bent the way conservative ideology is understood.
So if you go to like, say for example, cpac the convention of conservatives, um, you'll see a lot more kind of populist intuitionist kind of language and rhetoric than you would've say 10 years ago. Or 15 years ago. And conversely, liberalism has become much, much more oriented around scientific elites.
And if you think that, think about the main targets of the Trump administration right now. It tends to be, uh, media. It tends to be, you know, law firms. It tends to be scientists, it tends to be universities people who are highly educated and tend to be tilting much, much more towards the rationalist side of this dimension. And the Democratic party has, I, I think in a, in a lot, in a lot of sense, its leadership is very, very rational, rationalist in its orientation and to some extent at its own failing because its inability to communicate with a lot of ordinary voters comes from the fact that its leadership is so rationalist in their orient, in their understanding of the world.
And so that is, to me is a. As a political scientist and, and, and a [00:32:00] rationalist admitted, admittedly, I'm a pretty strong rationalist, but I, I actually think of democracy as a pretty rationalist enterprise. And what's alarming to me is when intuition is, captures a dominant political party and a dominant political leadership.
And you can see this around the world, it's democratic institutions that typically suffer. So the rise of populists, you know, this could be an Ugo Chavez on the left, or an Adolf Hitler on the right. These are people who are not very patient with political, I mean, democratic political procedures, and they typically tend, tend to squash democracy around that.
And it's important, uh, I think to me that one of the most troubling things about the evolution of conservatism as, as it becomes increasingly dominated by this intuitionist rhetoric, is not so much that rationalist conservatives are now in the wilderness, uh, which I think they are right now. You know, these folks who are like in the bulwark. For example, our, uh, Charlie Sykes you know, who have taken a strong stance, you know, as principles, conservatives against Donald Trump, and, and they're in the wilderness right now. They're, they're, they're really marginalized within both the Republican party and sort of conservative circles. And, these are people who are important elements when within democracy. I think democracy, you know, really needs strong, rational elements in its major political parties. And when we move away from that, we, we are, we are seeing the example of that, I think with the current Trump administration in terms of the nature of the appointees, the types of policy initiatives they're pursuing that tend to be not very well thought out, that tend to be very reflexive. and that's, I think what in some ways to what we're seeing is the crystallization of this kind of intuition is now within the halls of power.
Democrats' epistemic disadvantage countering Trumpian intuitionism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And and I would agree with you that the, the, the parties seem to have, have epistemically sorted themselves. And this has been a challenge for not just the Democrats either, but just the broader left in [00:34:00] general, is that it is now so much more rationalist oriented, there is kind of this just default to think that everything is about economics and that and so what, when, when, when you guys come along and say, well, no, people are choosing not just based on that they're based, they're choosing based on how they think.
That, that's Uh, paradoxically is not something that a lot of people, brought up in conventional left paradigms, which are economically centric. They can't, they seem to have great difficulty grasping what you guys are talking about, even subsequently, despite the fact that, uh, you know, Trump is, I mean, uh, going out there and, saying Harvard University can't admit international students or saying that you can't say certain words in your, in your scientific research even, and basic ones like woman, you can't even say the word woman.
OLIVER: Yep.
SHEFFIELD: Um, and or banning books, you know, or censoring authors. It's, so here, you know, here you have very clear totalitarian censorship. Um, but there's still kind of this lingering impulse for people to think, well, we, if we just talk more about economics, that's all we have to do.
OLIVER: Yeah, I, and I, I think there's some important things to, to keep in mind. So if you think about, kind of the dominant anchor groups in the Democratic party, um, there's still unions that are important and African Americans. And the interesting thing is in our measures, African Americans are much higher in their intuition scales than say whites are.
And I've, I've always thought that, um, or I should say that, you know, Trump's gains with black voters and Latino voters were not that surprising to me in so far as. He speaks a language that resonates with them. And one thing you can say about Trump for his his political skill is talking in the language of an [00:36:00] intuitionist.
And, and it, 'cause it's heartfelt. I think he's a, he's a strong, strong intuitionist himself. I mean, and he has all the, the symptoms of it. You know, he is terrified of germs, he's terrified of, of poisons. He's incredibly ethnocentric. And, you know, I think he would've made much, much bigger inroads into sort of the Democratic coalition had he not been so racist.
But it's, it's, he kind of stumbles on his own racism as far as his ability to, I think draw more black and Latino voters kind of into his coalition. Um, but he's so captured by kind of the white. Intuitionist base that itself has deep deep racial apprehensions, especially white evangelicals.
That he, he's a little hemmed in politically. But the Democrats had, you know, had Trump been more artful or more skillful in his intuition is I think he could have made much, much bigger inroads into the Democratic coalition.
The flip side of it is that the Democratic leadership, by and large is not, is, is a, is a very rationalist oriented group.
And when they approach voters, they say they, they're trying to approach voters. Having that kind of conversation that you and I are right now big ideas, fancy words, logical deductions, and, you know, that just doesn't coincide with how the majority of Americans who frankly don't pay a lot of attention to politics don't wanna pay a lot of attention to it. Um, I. In the, in the sense of not wanting to have a lot of information, they just wanna go what their gut is telling them. They need things that sort of cue in to their own emotional proclivities.
And, you know, I think effective leaders are, uh, democratic politicians are able to, to speak to that and find those ways.
But too many of and I've, I've addressed a lot of democratic politicians and I try to, you know, explain this research to them and then say, uh, you know, approaching the Americans and talking about policy prescriptions and the way that you're doing is gonna tune people out. That's not what mobilizes, people outside of a very small segment [00:38:00] of the electorate. And, um, there's gotta be different ways of communicating and, and you know, and acknowledging that people actually have fears and that their fears are valid and that their fears drive. How they understand the world. I mean, this is another thing that Trump did to great effect, which is, his constant negativity about how the US is falling apart and how we are surrounded by enemies and both, you know, internal and external.
And they're all out to get us, and they're all out to get us. And, you know, he, he amps up that anxiety that people have. And then when people are in that greater anxious state, they're much more likely to look for salvation. And I don't use that term lightly, but, you know, some sort of sense of relief from their own anxiety through a conspiracy or through some sort of very intuitionist oriented narrative about how politics goes forward.
Case study: Lucy's contradictory beliefs
SHEFFIELD: Uh, yeah. and, uh, you, you talk about a particular person that you had surveyed, um, in the introduction to the book. Or I guess early on in the book this woman named Lucy, who had a very. Kind of a contradictory set of beliefs. Can you, uh, tell the audience about that?
OLIVER: Yeah, I, I, we, we tried to have a few illustrations in the book of people who we thought were emblematic of this and, and at one level, Lucy seems like a, kind of like, similar to what I would describe earlier, like an organic kind of California hippie in terms of prioritizing natural foods and herbal remedies and health supplements and homeschooling her kids and really just being, you know, of the earth.
But she's also a very strident, evangelical Christian. And you know, believes that the end times are upon us and that, God's wrath is imminent and has a lot of apocalyptic visions [00:40:00] of the world. And when we were speaking to her and trying to talk through some of these and try to make sense of her orientation you know, we, we would talk about basic policy issues with her.
Like, so, you know, she's somebody who on at one level seems very liberal. She's very concerned with, social equality and seeing people not suffer and preserving healthcare for the poor. Um, and I think that reflects her honest Christian beliefs. And yet she would support Republican politicians who wanna, cut all those programs.
And you know, we would try to go back and forth and she'd always have some sort of rationale and say, well. Those democrats, they're just out for that particular group. You know, they, she would kind of echo a lot of, I think, what she consumed from Fox News and her rhetoric. And it finally, we, we'd go back and forth and back and forth, and then she just sort of stopped us and she said, you know, the, the difference between you and me is that you believe in reason and I believe in the Bible. And I, I thought that was a very prescient thing for her to observe, which is she just, she wasn't interested in having rational consistency. Uh, the, the thing that we know I would pride myself in as a, as a professor, a so social scientist that just, those criteria meant very little to her, you know, and what she, what meant to her is this sort of what was important to her was just this, I, you know, kind of a more mythic, uh, worldview, uh, kind of situated around a set of stories that she was interpreting. I, I, in a very particular kind of way, in, in a way that sort of, I think, satisfies her own emotional needs. And she was pretty upfront with that and saying that, you know, I, I I don't really have much need for your science. I, I've got my myth.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I thought it was very revealing comment, but it, and it, it matches. The epistemology that I have seen in evidence and, in my former life as a fundamentalist Mormon, but also, you know, in as a Republican activist that I would, I, I I I used [00:42:00] to sometimes do training speeches and lectures, classes, et cetera, and various groups.
And it was very interesting. I, it was, it was very bizarre to me at the time because after I had finished the lecture I would open it up for questions from the audience. And very, very often first question that I got was, well, why aren't you telling us what you believe about the world?
aren't you telling us in your speech about how to make a website? Why aren't you starting with, here's what I believe. And my response was always, well, because I'm not here to tell you what I believe. I'm here to tell you how to have a nice website and what you can do to get people to read it. and, you know, and, and, and one person responded back to me, he said, well, I'm not sure that I can trust you if I don't know where you stand.
OLIVER: Yeah, I, I mean that's, I think in our increasing digital age, that's becoming, that's becoming more and more common. And so something that comes up a lot when I'm giving talks on this and people ask, are conspiracies now more common than they were? I. A hundred years ago or 50 years ago or something like that. And I know the answer I don't think is yes, I think the answer is no.
Conspiracy theories existed long before the internet
OLIVER: I think if you look in American history, there's a long, long, rich history of conspiracies. You can, for example, the during the revolutionary period where we have all of these old newspapers and they're rife with conspiracy theories about, king George and loyalists and all of this stuff, and this continues.
We, we even had, you know, the anti mason party, we had a political party that was kind of based in the early 19th century on. Conspiracy theory about masons and, you know, fear of masons. Uh, so there's a rich history of this in the United States, and it and it kind of goes in line with the United States as also a country where you have these periods of evangelical fervor, you know, these, these [00:44:00] great awakenings that come up that throughout our history where, um, not only do, uh, compared to our European counterparts, we're far more religious in our orientation and far more kind of orthodox and seeking orthodoxy in our orientation.
So there's these, these currents have always gone through American society, excuse me.
But what changes is the media environment and I think they, they sort of arise when media, new kinds of media come, come in. So you can see this with, the rise of the penny press. You can see this with the rise of radio which is sort of widely disseminated.
And then it tends to get kind of consolidated and then you have. Organizations that curate kind of information and, but what we've seen in the past 20 years is this explosion of information. And there's, the sources of curation are now things like, Facebook or Twitter are now XI guess it's called, and their curatorial inclinations are unclear.
And we're seeing far less kind of content curation than what we've seen before. And what this allowed for is what were typically transgressive kinds of beliefs have become a lot more visible. So, uh, and Alex Jones now has a far greater vi visibility than he would've had or been allowed to, been, you know, capable of having say, 30 or 40 years ago.
'cause there just wasn't the means for it. And you know, one of the interesting stories about this is like William F. Buckley, when he was founding National Review and sort of laying the foundations of modern conservatism. It went to great links to kind of keep the John Birchers, on the margins.
And really, really stifled those elements within conservatism that, you know, have now I think come to grip the party to grip the movement.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, I, I would disagree with you on Buckley in that regard, but I would say there were other Republicans who did that, like, uh, George HW Bush or, uh, Jim Bak. [00:46:00] But, uh, I, I have a separate episode about Buckley actually,
OLIVER: Oh, really?
SHEFFIELD: that I'll, uh, I can send you and I'll put it in our show notes.
OLIVER: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: that as well.
Conservatism vs. reactionism
SHEFFIELD: Um, but yeah, I mean, generally I, I agree with that and, and that is why I do think it is important for people in the center to left to distinguish between conservatism and reaction is because conservatism is a, is a political philosophy that believes in extrinsic exchange so that they have to modify their beliefs to fit with reality.
Whereas reaction says, no. Reality is wrong and we're going to attack it. And that's, I think, is the difference between the second Trump term and the first Trump term is that first Trump term had a lot of, conservatives who were out there constraining his iil and his extremism. I mean, you know, his like, and, and, and there was always this constant refrain from a lot of people who were more conservative Republicans back in those times.
Like there would be anonymous reports from the, you know, in the New York Times or somewhere that said. Donald Trump says he wants to buy Greenland. And, uh, the Trump communications people in that first administration would say, that's a lie. We're not doing that. That's, that's liberal bias to say that he's gonna, that he wants, that when in fact, of course, it was the truth.
And that they were lying to themselves and lying to the public, uh, or at the very least, you know, lying, yeah. Lying to the public who knows about lying to themselves. is who he always was. I think a, a lot of people who have more conservative beliefs, they want to believe that the reactionaries are not in control of the Republican Party.
But the reality shows that that is obviously the case. I mean, you got somebody like Russ Vote, the OMB director saying that America has a duty to obey God. [00:48:00] That's who's in charge of the budget of the United
OLIVER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: America. And you're, and you're saying that the Democratic party is more extreme than the Republican party,
OLIVER: Yeah. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: But you know, there's this fiction that I think a lot of conservative people have sold themselves, uh, about Trump and about the people who actually run the Republican party.
OLIVER: well, in, in, in some ways it, it, we talk about polarization in this country and, you know, the sort of strong, larger gulf between liberals and conservatives than there used to be, and especially between Democrats and Republicans than there used to be. But there's also a wider gulf in this epistemology in so far as if you went back and look at surveys from the 1960s, 98% of Americans believe in God. Uh, it just, atheism was just one of the strangest things you could be. In fact, it was, we have surveys from this time and where people are, one of the, the groups that they're most tolerant of is atheists. Now within that there was, you know, big diversity of beliefs about what God was. But there was a general sense of, you know, like everybody went to church and everybody believed in God and nothing was open on Sunday.
And, it was, we, we were, there was a greater kind of consensus as that's changed a lot with, I would say, you know, about a third of Americans now, uh, they won't call themselves atheists, but they, you know, will not subscribe to any kind of particular religious belief. And you, you've got kind of a third on that, that end.
And then you've got, you know, about, probably around a third who, you know, would describe themselves as conservative, Orthodox or evangelical and their appreciation. And with that comes, you know, a set of beliefs which are really, as you would say, reactionary or, really magical in terms of the belief that the Bible is the inherent word of God.
That in times or upon us. And so this, this is one thing I, I like to point out in my surveys is like. Typically around 30% of our survey respondents say that they really believe the, that the end times are upon us. That, you know, we're, we're, we're about to, to see the, you [00:50:00] know, the return of Jesus Christ.
And the, you know, there's a certain narcissism to this, and this is what's I think important to, to highlight about intuition, is that there's a certain kind of infantile narcissism because it's a, it, it, it's based on the idea. Like if I'm feeling it, it must be true. And, you know, unquestioned, you know, it
goes back to like my son when he was a kid, like, you know, if he's afraid there's gotta be monsters in the closet.
That's, that's sort of what drives reality is one's own internal experience. And and, you know, wow, we have those people, like you said, who are now in the upper echelons of power and our government and are using that.
So, you know, taking the example of Carolyn Levitt you know, the Press Secretary of the White House, like she does a prayer session before she goes out, uh, and says, you know, dear God, Jesus, help me, you know, show the truth to the American people. And then, you know, of course she goes out and, you know, tries to, paper over all the, excesses of the, of the administration.
SHEFFIELD: and lie,
OLIVER: Yeah. And there's lot, yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Jesus, please help me lie.
OLIVER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: essentially what these are. But you know what? That actually, actually, she's a great example though because, the press secretary, the final press secretary for Donald Trump, Kaley McEnany also had this similarly narcissistic and delusional religious worldview because she actually wrote an article saying that she believed that you know, she was that, that liberals were, were going to.
Kill her. Almost like she had a fear of liberals killing her for being a Christian. And that she was going to stand because, and so there's this whole myth out of the Columbine, killing that there was this one girl who was shot. Um, and, and that she was supposedly asked, and this never happened by the way, but they all think it did.
There that, uh, that she was, she was asked before she was shot,
OLIVER: Just like.
SHEFFIELD: a Christian? And she said, yes, and then she was killed. And so like there is this, [00:52:00] this huge martyrdom fetish with a lot of these reactionary evangelicals and I, and I think you're right to say that it is a, narcissistic impulse.
OLIVER: Yeah, I mean, and just, you know, watch 10 Minutes of Fox News and you'll see that too, like, you know, we are victimized by those evil forces. It's a very mannequin worldview, uh, which is, understanding the world is divided into good and evil. And, um, ultimately this kind of apo apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.
And of course, if we have our beliefs, then we are the good by virtue of that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. So at the same, so we, we've kind of talked about it a little bit but I wanted to circle back to just the, the, the problem that Democrats have now because, their, their political paradigm is, well, people vote based on their economic interest and based on policy. And now we're in an environment where people do not vote on their economic interest and they do not even know what the policies are.
I mean, in the, in the last presidential election, as I'm sure you probably saw the. Various exit polls. The people who knew the least about politics are the ones who supported Trump the most. And the people who paid the most attention to the news were the people who supported Trump the least. So we're in a situation where you have a democratic, so the polis itself to use the Aristotelian word, the polis itself doesn't know what it wants and has no means to acquire that knowledge.
Um, at least in the current environment. It seems to me
OLIVER: Well, I mean, so this is a critique that. I have been hearing as long as I've been an adult. In fact, it was one of the reasons I became a political scientist because
SHEFFIELD: it.
OLIVER: I was really intrigued why, you know, I, I had gone to college and I had read, uh, all this marks and [00:54:00] said, you know, mark says basically, if you wanna understand politics, look at people's class interest, and that's gonna explain everything. And, uh, yet here were all these people who were voting against their class interest. And I was, as a liberal, I was looking at it in terms of working class people who were supporting conservative causes. But, you know, you can also say it on the, on the left too, that, you know, the left is comprised of a lot of very educated, wealthy people who are willing to tax themselves to support the poor.
So it's, the discrepancies kind of go both ways. You know, just as there was that famous book by Thomas Frank, you know, what's the matter with Kansas? And, you know, you could write a book, you know, what's the matter with Brooklyn that was kind of saying the same thing. Um, but. So I, I, I wanna be careful about like, sort of, I don't wanna pathologize or demonize people and their political beliefs as a political scientist. We tend to see these things in much more tectonic terms as far as they shift. So, you know, right now it's very common to bash on the Democrats and, you know, rightly so in terms of their capitulation of going along with Biden's reelection decision. Uh, and I remember you know, a couple years ago pointing out my hair.
It's sort of saying, you know, this is not a good candidate to run for reelection. Not simply because of his age, but the, the, the bargain everyone made was we, we, get behind Biden because he's the one person who can. Everybody could get Trump out with, but he was only supposed to be there for one term. And but even if the Democrats had nominated, uh, Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro, or, they had had a competitive, uh, primary process, I'm skeptical that they, the results would've been necessarily much different. Um, and you know, there, there are sort of large forces that kind of drive the, the electorate.
And one way to think about it is that, you know, probably about if we, you have an election, if we had [00:56:00] an presidential elections every year, you would have about 90 to 93% of people who would be voting the same every year regardless. That they're just, they're very much stuck in their partisan orientations. They kind of arrange their worldview around that, and it's very, very hard to dislodge them off of that. It, it takes a pretty a. Pretty big shock to do that. And the last time we probably saw something of that magnitude was in the 2006 to 2008 period when the Iraq War went bad and the economy went south. But even then, a lot of those people shifted from the Republican party to claiming themselves to be independents. And then, but then they ended up sort of drifting back. So the question is this, you know, sort of this small group that's in the middle and, you know, there's a lot of soul searching in the Democratic party about, well, what should we be doing?
And, you know, how should we be doing things differently? And I, I think there's, there's some reasonable things to say about it. Well, how are you messaging the core? Tenets of what it means to be a Democratic party.
Democrats are perceived as the status quo party
OLIVER: And I, you know, part of the problem that Democrats have is that in some ways they're a very status quo party right now.
There there's not a lot of sort of big innovative change that they're seeing. They're, they're thinking like, for them the big innovative change is like the Green New Deal. But, you know, most people, that doesn't speak to most people 'cause it's addressing a climate change that's happening very, very slowly.
SHEFFIELD: Or having a, leader who's not 80 years old but is 70 years old.
OLIVER: Right. Right. Yeah, I, I mean, so the, there, there isn't that kind of like dynamic visionary that's offering, you know, a, a fundamentally different vision about how the country should go. And there, there is a certain irony that liberals in some ways are much more like traditional conservatives now and conservatives, at least under Donald Trump's leadership have become the sort of agents of change.
SHEFFIELD: The, reactionaries. Yeah.
OLIVER: yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, and I as part. part. of what I think on this is just that it's, it's waiting for those, [00:58:00] uh, I mean, my joke on this, and this is maybe the James Carville idea, which is just you let them drive the, into the bus, into the ditch again, which, they often do. And then people realize that this is what's gonna take to sort of disabuse people of their kind of, the power of, of this reactionary impulse.
And you know, I think it's important to notice that, you know, for all of the soul searching of the Democratic party, uh, Trump remains a very unpopular president. And, um, and I, I don't see any indications that his popularity is gonna increase over the next few years. And so, part of it is that then the next, whoever gets the nomination next is gonna come in and they're gonna be able to sort of. Reclaim the mandate of the middle and say, I, you know, I represent, you know, the real American voice. And, uh, and that will have some power. And then, you know, the discussion will be talking about, like, particularly after Trump, what's, who, who are the Republicans? I think in four years we'll be talking about, you know, it's the Republican party more likely than not to be in the wilderness.
So may be wrong, uh, but this, you know, these tense things tend to go in kind of pendulum swings. But in the short run then the, the question is, is what can the Democratic party do to sort of reclaim at least some faith? I mean that the, the challenge that Democrats have right now is that the party image is, is, is pretty tainted and tarnished.
And, um, and so I think it's finding, uh, it's both finding an agenda that speaks to people's real concerns. And that is people are, are not happy with the status quo for a variety of reasons. And so when you're a party of the status quo. You know, that's a little bit of a harder message to get out and then articulating it in a way that speaks to people's fears, uh, which are driving a lot of their understandings of the world.
And, um, and I, I think some democratic leaders do this much better than others. And, uh, you know, the, the person that comes to mind who I think is a great communicator is Pete Buttigieg. He's really capable of sort of bridging this divide. I mean, [01:00:00] Pete Buttigieg himself is a total rationalist, but he speaks in a way, in ways that I think appeal to people's intuitions you know, their sense of decency and fairness and justice.
He's very articulate and, and, clear in that way without being condescending.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I would say that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does a pretty good job at that as well.
OLIVER: Well, yeah, and I, she's got a remarkable political talent that I think people dismiss. At, at their own peril. Like her ability, her once again, she's kind of an intuitionist, really. And, and her, her ability to, to speak to that kind of the, I think the intuitive impulses within sort of, at least the left, the left turn flanks the left flanks of the Democratic party are very astute.
How intuitionism fueled conspiracy theories during the Covid-19 pandemic
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well definitely. Well, we could probably do this all day, but I know you, we both have things to do here, but let's, maybe if we can end on, um, talking about the idea of, of confidence in institutions because that is another, significant part of the, of the book. and you, you guys published this before the pandemic and, uh, you found that Intuitionist people had a lot of doubts about public health agencies and about vaccines.
Um, and the subsequent event since then proved that there was, uh, a, know, this what you, what you guys had predicted was this latent anti-vaccine, anti medical constituency. emerged during the pandemic and, and, uh, really has become a significant part of the Republican party in many ways.
OLIVER: Um, at least in its rhetoric. I mean, one of the things that's important to bear in mind here was that, you know, for all the anti-vaccine rhetoric that was out there, if you look at people who are over 65, regardless of their political beliefs, they were getting vaccinated at the same rates. You know, the, the people who were not getting vaccinated were people who were arguably, you know, least vulnerable to COVID, and so it became [01:02:00] kind of, kind of convenient as a, you know, as a political talking point.
Now that's still a convenient political talking point. I, I think the, you know, if, like, for example, the current rhetoric around, you know, apprehension around measles vaccine is because we haven't had a huge measles outbreak. And people forget like, well, how terrible measles actually can be and how many people can actually die from it when, you know, that's, it's actually a deadly disease. 'cause the things all me measles is maybe this unfortunate thing that you get as kid. No, it kills people. And so, you know, in, in some ways the rhetoric re reflects a divorce from reality. And, you know, um, uh, like, people can't update their beliefs when, when faced with that kind of cold, hard fact.
The, the question of the matter is, is, you know, with with COVID it became. It, it did encapsulate this, this deep apprehension a about kind of a fear of medical authorities and, you know, Anthony Fauci cast as sort of the great evil Satan that he, you know, is, uh, on the right, you know, is I think emblematic of this, of, of wanting to have kind of a scapegoat for their own apprehensions.
And they're, and they're, it's a, I think it's what it reflects is a, a, a feeling of a lack of autonomy and control that people have in their lives. Uh, a sense of vulnerability and in, in that vulnerability wanting to, not having faith in public institutions that they were be protected anymore.
That, and and that, and know a big problem with the way that COVID messaging was laid out was I think in, twofold. One, not. In some ways, recognizing what were the deep social costs of isolation and masking, and particularly keeping kids outta schools for a long period of time.
And kind of a bli ignorance or almost a willful ignorance of like what those costs would be and what they were asking people to bear relative to the probabilistic cause of like, oh, getting COVID and, you know, and then turns out, well, maybe COVID isn't so bad, and people not [01:04:00] recognizing that COVID, in fact, you know, killed Amer a million Americans. Um, so I, there's, there's a lot of complicated messaging around that. But, COVID became, because it, it was such a big anxiety inducing event and in some ways the public health messaging only exacerbated that. And
so.
SHEFFIELD: because it didn't, it did not correspond to the fears in the opposite direction that people were having. And nothing wrong with people, know, having a suspicion of something that they had never heard about, like mRNA vaccines like it was, this was a technology that was moved to the finish line in response to the pandemic.
And people would naturally be skeptical of something that had
OLIVER: Well,
SHEFFIELD: pushed like that.
OLIVER: I, I, I, I think that, you know, part of the, the issue was nobody was being frank, I said, listen, we have this pandemic. It's out of control. It's going to kill a certain number of Americans, particularly vulnerable. What we are trying desperately to do is not overwhelm our health infrastructure right now. And what the real safety measures in place was to keep from the country, from having what New York experienced kind of in, you know, March and April of 2020, which is just, you know, these vans filled with bodies, that because they couldn't handle them. With respect to the public health infrastructure, but of course, nobody wants to use that kind of message.
And and so there, there was not, I, I think there was, there was a lack of candor and clarity on the, on the, on the behalf of sort of public health messaging on this. And then, and an understanding of, okay, how do we, how do we talk to people's fears in an honest way? And, um, and, and, you know, in, in, instead of sort of, you know, giving out advice, I think that people had reason to be skeptical of, and in so doing kind of undermine their own faith in their own public institutions.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, it was, it was very unfortunate. And I think even now people are, [01:06:00] are missing the opportunity to, have some, at least, you know, emotional reproachment in that regard.
OLIVER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Um, all right. Well, so, we talked about this book which you published a few years ago. Uh, but you, uh, personally have a, a newer book which we will be discussing on a subsequent episode, but I wanted to give you to the chance to plug that on here.
Very.
OLIVER: yeah, sure. So, um, just in addition to doing research on conspiracy theories and public opinion one of the other things I do is I teach a class here at the University of Chicago and how to know yourself. And I've taught this class for about 20 years, and I've met a lot of adults who, when they hear about the class are intrigued and they say, oh, do you have a book to recommend?
And I said, well, no, I have hundreds. Um, so I thought, well, maybe here was an opportunity. And so I wrote a book on how to know yourself. So it's gonna be coming out this January. And the book is called How to Know Yourself, the Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah. And it's a good book. I have read it. It's, uh, you got a lot of good stuff in there.
OLIVER: Oh,
thanks.
SHEFFIELD: uh, so for, uh, people who want to keep up with you where, what's, what are your recommendations for that?
OLIVER: so if you wanna find out more about what I've written, you can go on j eric oliver.com. And I'm also host of a podcast myself, which we are about to launch the third season, uh, this summer. Uh, and it's called Nine Questions with Eric Oliver. And it's a podcast really about, uh, it was originally about how to know yourself, uh, and it was me going around asking kind of the profound questions to interesting and smart people about how they found purpose and meaning in life.
And it's now kind of a more general interest podcast, but there's still a lot of kind of strong content around how do we understand things like consciousness or finding happiness or, you know, finding health.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. And, uh, what's the, uh, website address for that for
OLIVER: Oh, that's, uh, nine questions.com.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, great. All right, well, uh, thanks for being here today, Eric.
OLIVER: All right. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to talk.
SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program [01:08:00] for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where you can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks to everybody who is a paid subscribing member of the show.
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