The Minefield

Waleed Aly, Scott Stephens and philosopher Stephanie Collins field questions from a live studio audience on crowd-behaviour, conformity and the importance of dissent.

Ever since Plato, “crowds” have been associated with irrationality, emotivism, conformism, short-term thinking, and herd-like behaviour. But what if it turns out that crowds are collectively more intelligent than their individual members?

What are we trying to convey when we reach for a word like “evil”? Is it something about a person’s actions or character? Is it what they do or the manner in which they do it?

It is worth reflecting, not just on what is singular about Taylor Swift at this particular cultural moment — why she attracts both the loyalty and the animus that she does — but on what it is about live music events that now draw millions of people to them.

Over the last 18 months, enormously powerful generative AI tools have been placed in the hands of anyone who wants them; as a consequence, the internet and our social media feeds have been inundated with wholly or partially synthetic content.

Because it is sustained by nothing more substantial than a weave of trusted institutions, shared habits and moral commitments, democracies are highly susceptible to the corrosive effects of distrust; Jedediah Purdy joins Waleed and Scott to discuss the necessary conditions for democratic life.

Ours is a time when institutional distrust, digital disinformation and mutual suspicion have become pervasive — but can democracy withstand epistemic and social fragmentation of this kind?

Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.

It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.