Wisdom of Crowds

An emergency pod: “War, or something resembling war, is breaking out in the Middle East,” says Shadi Hamid. A year after the October 7 massacre, Israel has all but destroyed Hamas. Last month, it killed Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, thus decapitating that terrorist organization. This week, it launched an invasion of southern Lebanon. In retaliation, Iran — the longtime backer of Hezbollah — has lobbed a barrage of ballistic missiles into Israel.

We decided to release the podcast early this week, before it is overtaken by the swiftly-moving events. What is this war about? What should the US do about it? Does anyone in the US political class truly believe that the Arab world is capable of democracy? Were the Abraham Accords foolish — or racist? How do you define a “rogue state”? What is Netanyahu right about?

Joining Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss these questions is Matt Duss, Executive Vice President of the Center for International Policy, co-host of the Undiplomatic Podcast, and former foreign policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders.

“A lot of [Arab Americans] are not going to pull the lever for Kamala Harris,” Shadi reports. Matt lambasts the “racist logic” of the Abraham Accords, which swept the Palestinian question aside and decided that “this is the best [America] can hope for, deals with modernizing autocrats.” Damir applies a realpolitik analysis, explaining the Israeli military strategy and arguing that American and European diplomats have no choice but to strike deals with the autocrats that rule the world. Shadi responds: “Realpolitik is supposed to be effective.”

It’s a passionate, intense discussion that strikes at the core preoccupations of Wisdom of Crowds: justice, war, and the state. Free for all subscribers: You will want to listen to the whole thing.

Required Reading:

* Shadi’s responses to subscribers’ provocations about the Middle East (WoC).

* Bruno Maçães’ article on the end of Western hypocrisy (Time).

* Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2016 article on “The Obama Doctrine” (The Atlantic).

* James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (YouTube).

* The Abraham Accords (US State Department).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

What is human dignity? Is it a real thing, or merely an idea? If it’s real, then where does it come from? And why do only human beings have dignity? What about other intelligent beings? What about the octopus?

These are only some of the many questions that Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos talk about in a slow-burn, philosophical episode of Wisdom of Crowds. Because Santiago is executive editor of Wisdom of Crowds, Damir wants to learn more about his bedrock convictions. He cross-examines Santiago about his religion, politics, and formative experiences.

At first, Damir finds in Santiago a kindred spirit: both are skeptical about power and about big political theories. But Santiago does have one fundamental conviction that he is not skeptical about: universal human dignity. Damir presses Santiago on this topic. What is human dignity? How do you know it exists? And do only human beings have dignity? What about other intelligent animals? What about … octopi?

The ending is one of the richest parts of the conversation, so we made this episode is free for all subscribers.

* Daniel Patrick Moynihan documentary (PBS).

* Song about the guerrilla priest: Victor Jara, “Camilo Torres” (YouTube).

* “Of New Things,” Pope Leo XIII (Vatican.va).

* “On the Progress of Peoples,” Paul VI (Vatican.va).

* Jacques Maritain and the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNESCO).

* The Cold War in Latin America (RetroReport).

* Michael Novak obituary (New York Times).

* Iraq War timeline (Council on Foreign Relations).

* Thomas Aquinas on the human soul (Summa Theologiae, New Advent).

* Valladolid debate on the rights of indigenous people (In Our Time, BBC).

* Octopus intelligence (Natural History Museum).

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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

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How does order emerge from anarchy? How do human beings create institutions? Can big problems — like climate change, income inequality, or AI alignment — find solutions “from below,” through collective action, rather than “from above,” i.e., imposed by regulatory bodies?

Today’s guest is a fascinating economist. Professor Paul Dragoș Aligică is a senior research fellow at the Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest.

Paul believes that we are living through the third great moment in human history, after the transition to agriculture and the industrial revolution. What will this third moment be about?

Far too broad to pigeonhole, he’s a visionary public choice theorist and a student of renowned economists Vincent and Elinor Ostrom (the latter won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009). Paul has thought long and hard about the strange inflection point our world seems to be hurtling towards. It’s a slow burn of an episode, one where interesting and complex ideas are laid out carefully, before Damir and Santiago engage Paul in sussing out their implications.

Does Paul think that public choice theory means the world has hope? How do we fix the seemingly intractable problems posed by capitalism and globalization? Tune in to find out.

Required Reading and Viewing:

* Paul Dragoș Aligică’s personal website.

* Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Amazon).

* What is the Tragedy of the Commons? (Harvard Business School).

* Elinor Ostrom on Ending the Tragedy of the Commons (Big Think on YouTube).

* Santiago Ramos, “What Does McDonald’s Mean?” (WoC).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

A very special episode this week, completely free for all listeners. The world-famous philosopher Charles Taylor joins Wisdom of Crowds editors Samuel Kimbriel and Santiago Ramos for a conversation about his new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

Professor Taylor has spent a long and fruitful career trying to understand the basic questions of modern life. What does it mean to be a modern person? How do we form our sense of identity? How do we relate to the sacred? What does it mean to be secular? What happened to religion? In Cosmic Connections, he tells the story of how the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century sought to reconnect with nature through art, after the rise of modern science and the industrial revolution left many people wondering about man’s place in the universe.

Appropriately enough, Sam called in from a log cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and he enthusiastically supported Professor Taylor’s thesis that a connection with nature is an essential component of a healthy society. The more city-bound Santiago took a more skeptical approach, at least at first. He questioned Professor Taylor’s claim that a connection with nature entails a connection with a transcendent, spiritual reality. Along with these heady topics, the conversation touched upon Beethoven’s symphonies, A.I. “friends,” and the idea of progress.

Required Reading (and Listening):

* Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Amazon).

* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Amazon).

* Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Amazon).

* Damir Marusic, “Beauty and Niceness in an Accidental World” (WoC).

* Romanticism (School of Life).

* Henry David Thoreau (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Beethoven, Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement (YouTube).

* Beethoven, Sixth Symphony “Pastoral” (YouTube).

* “Wear This A.I. Friend Around Your Neck” (Wired).

* Joni Mitchell (Official YouTube Page).

* Leonard Cohen (Official YouTube Page).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live

The Harris-Walz campaign is having a moment. It is polling well. Harris made a good speech at the Democratic National Convention. The Democratic Convention as a whole got better TV ratings than the Republican one. Harris’s campaign is all about joy. Even Shadi’s parents are feeling the vibes (and using the word, “vibes,” probably for the first time).

But Shadi and Damir aren’t feeling it. No joy. No vibes. No excitement about the current moment in American politics. What’s going on is at best groupthink, at worst, the manufacturing of consent. Our podcast hosts are skeptical about the fact that the media made an abrupt 180-degree turn on Harris: someone who was once considered a political dud is now seen as “the second coming of Barack Obama.”

But soon Shadi and Damir start interrogating their assumptions. Is it necessarily a bad thing that large numbers of people are feeling positive emotions? Could large trends and coalitions develop organically, through common affinity, rather than through the machinations of politicians and propagandists? Could a campaign based on good vibes actually be more efficient at creating a Democratic Party platform that appeals to the median American voter? Maybe the Harris-Walz campaign is forcing us, as Damir puts it, to “update our priors on what democratic politics is.”

In the bonus concluding section for our paid subscribers, our hosts make a 180-degree turn of their own. They explore learning to like Harris and embracing the vibes. “No one is talking about threats of civil war anymore,” Shadi observes. This is a good thing. “People want to feel good about their country.” Maybe Harris is making that possible for millions of voters.

Required Reading:

* “Harris has upended years of Democratic dogma. That’s good,” by Shadi Hamid and Aden Barton (Washington Post).

* “The Peculiar Moderation of Donald Trump,” by Shadi Hamid (Washington Post).

* Full text of Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention (PBS).

* Our CrowdSource about “vibes” (WoC).

* Noam Chomsky on “manufacturing consent” (YouTube).

* Matt Yglesias on “popularism” (Slow Boring).

* Matt Yglesias on the “unhinged moderation” of the Republicans (Slow Boring).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live

Elon Musk just started tweeting about the Iliad. But our guest, Twitter’s Audrey Horne, has been talking about Homer with Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic for at least two weeks now — well before Elon turned his attention to these kinds of things. We figured this was an excuse to share some of the offline chatter with the Crowd. If Elon’s interested in it, it has to be relevant, right?

Christians and Greeks both agree that the world is cruel: one must not look away from the despair we all face. And yet the Greeks face it with “no consoling prospect of immortality,” as Simone Weil puts it. Leaving aside whether it’s true, is the Christian approach better?

This is a classic Wisdom of Crowds rambler: a free-wheeling conversation about faith, meaning, purpose and the very nature of reality. What better way to wrap up the dog days?

Required Reading:

* Twitter’s Audrey Horne tweeting about butter (X).

* “Talk to Me Nicely,” by Twitter’s Audrey Horne (WoC).

* “How to Think About Fallenness,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).

* “Why Give a Damn,” by Samuel Kimbriel (WoC).

* “What Are Children For?” with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (WoC).

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” goes the famous line from Joan Didion — but is it worth it? How do narratives help us make sense of our lives, and how might they be misleading? Advertisements these days are full of them, but can a company really have a story of its own? And could having “main character energy” actually indicate a fundamental philosophical problem?

In this special live recording from the Lyceum Movement’s Tallgrass Ideas Festival in Des Moines, Iowa, Sam was joined by Hannah Kim, philosopher at the University of Arizona and associate editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to discuss why storytelling has become such a prominent part of our cultural conversation, the philosophy of stories and narratology, and dig into how “storification” can limit our ability to understand our own lives.

Join the Crowd in getting the real story on stories themselves.

Required Reading:

* More about the Lyceum Movement.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live

The international drop in baby-making is currently in the headlines, and it’s been constant preoccupation for us at Wisdom of Crowds (including in our latest edition of CrowdSource). It concerns us not only because of the possible long-term economic consequences but also because a people’s inability — or lack of desire — to reproduce itself might be the consequence of serious moral or social problems.

Enter philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. Anastasia is a professor at University of California at Irvine, while Rachel is managing editor for The Point. Berg and Wiseman have written a book that asks the fundamental question right in the title: What Are Children For? Why should people reproduce? Should people desire to do so? And why has there been a drop in birth rates? What are the issues underneath the decline of fertility in the United States and around the so-called developed world?

Damir presses Anastasia and Rachel on the question of false consciousness. Are the young people telling themselves stories or giving themselves excuses instead of just … making a choice? In response, Anastasia and Rachel say that they take a sympathetic approach. They analyze the objective factors that seem to hinder family formation — cost of living, inability to find a mate, fear of the future, etc. — and see whether they truly are insurmountable. As philosophers, their goal is to enhance the free choice of individuals. If what you choose “by inertia” (because it is the cultural default) is not what you would choose if you had thought about things more clearly, then you are not truly free.

The conversation runs deep, but it is also extremely relatable for Wisdom of Crowds listeners who, on average, tend to be on the younger side. Stick around for a quasi-defense of Millennials, too. They’re not immature; in fact, they might be too “old” for their age …

Enjoy!

Required Reading:

* What are Children for? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (Amazon).

* “On Choosing Life,” by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (The Point).

* Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba (Amazon).

* “The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids,” by Christine Emba (The Atlantic).

* “Wham! Choose Life” T-shirt (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

It’s a dog days of summer special! This week, we are releasing a live interview from last April, that’s more timely today than when it was first recorded. Dictators and their sychophants; democracy imperiled by foreign policy misadventures. Sound familiar?

For almost a century, American intellectuals of different political stripes have been in thrall to dictators. They’ve either projected utopian ideals on to them, or been seduced by their charisma and alleged effectiveness. The story of left wing intellectuals falling for figures like Stalin or Castro has already been told. In a new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn, author and editor of the National Interest, tells the story of the American political right and its dalliances with overseas despots. Joining Damir as co-host is friend of the pod Professor Jennifer Murtazashvili, head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets, which graciously supports our work.

As usual, Damir veers the discussion towards first principles. Are people more likely to be seduced by dictatorships when liberalism is perceived to be failing? Is liberalism perceived to be failing more often during wartime or peacetime? Just what is attractive about despotism? Should liberals accept that a certain amount of “ineffectiveness” is part and parcel of the liberal order? Tune in for a riveting discussion of these questions and more.

Required Reading:

* “Apologists without Remorse,” by Jacob Heilbrunn (American Prospect).

* America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn.

* “Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?” by Robert Kagan.

* U.S. Military Interventions since 1890 (Evergreen State College).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe

That was fast. Just days after Joe Biden chose to remove himself from the presidential ticket, Kamala Harris is the unquestioned candidate of the Democratic Party. But was this a democratic process? Or was Biden bullied out of the ticket, and Harris shoehorned into it, without any attention paid to the peoples’ wishes? And who are “the people,” anyway?

Joining us to debate these questions is the author Freddie deBoer — one of the most influential and provocative leftist thinkers writing today. Freddie runs an extremely popular Substack. His latest book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, is about how progressive institutions betrayed their own ideals. In the elevation of Harris to the presidential ticket, deBoer sees the same betrayal at work.

Damir and Shadi press Freddie on what democracy actually is, and how it would manifest itself within the workings of a modern political party. Were the contested electoral conventions of yore really less democratic that the process as it exists today? And what is the future of democracy within the Democratic Party?

Due to the special circumstances of our crazy electoral season, we are making this episode free for all listeners. Make sure you listen to the very end, so you can find out who is Freddie’s candidate for best Democrat president of his lifetime (it’s not who you think).

Required Reading

* “So Just Literally No Democratic Process From the Democrats,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

* “I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

* How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Freddie deBoer (Amazon).

* The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Freddie deBoer (Amazon).

* “Kamala Harris and the End of Democratic Debate,” by Shadi Hamid (Substack).

* “Planet of Cops,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe