Feb 07 2025 37 mins 7
“How is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?” - so asked Karl Popper in a number of places not least in “The Economist”, 1988 here: https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/01/31/from-the-archives-the-open-society-and-its-enemies-revisited His question was to highlight that the more traditional question in political science of “Who should rule?” was misguided and led to perverse answers such as, in Plato’s case: philosopher kings; an expert ruling class. Popper’s idea is that democracy, not regarded as “rule by the majority” but rather a system of error correction where elections allowed a process of voting out rulers who the ruled thought were bad more resembled the process that happens in science where experiment can rule out theories that cannot explain reality. The logic, therefore was the same: a form of modus tollens technically. If P then Q. Not Q therefore not P.
If the Republicans are better rulers then they make better rules.
Republicans don’t make better rules.
Therefore they are not better rulers.
So vote them out.
In the last election, the ruled decided this logic held not for Republicans but Democrats and they were roundly voted out. This, on Popper’s view is not an endorsement of how wonderful the Republicans are but rather how the Democrats failed. Now the Republicans have a chance to make better rules. Will they?
At the executive level the President of the United States is uniquely powerful. Indeed for members of allied nations, such as the United Kingdom and Australia we possess nothing quite like the possibility of such wide ranging and deep power in a single person as the president of the united states. In our nations, as most places in the Westminster system, the head of the government - the Prime Minister is positively weak by comparison. And this is the way we like it. I shall come back to this.
But is there a way of comparing different democratic systems? On ToKCast I spend most of my time creating content that has nothing to do with the news cycle or the politics of the day. Here at “The 3Rs: Reality, Reason and Rationality” I allow myself the indulgence when there is interesting crossover with my interest in the topic of: under what conditions does society flourish, progress accelerate and change happen rapidly whilst a society is able to remain stable? Trump has recently, we have been told, done a lot. This is rapid change, it appears, by any metric. Could this cause instability or is instability already here? Perhaps the mass migration that is occurring, in particular where immigration is happening in some places too quickly in places where there exist welfare states, is causing places that were once stable havens of progress to regress?
The incomparable Douglas Murray has claimed societies are like “fragile ecosystems” - see for example:
So for Murray this suggests we must be careful about upsetting the balance of people and cultures we introduce - particularly into the West. Now Murray is on to something here: many societies are fragile - and have failed precisely because of a species of fragility due to “rigidity”; an inability to adapt to change whether environmental or cultural. Those are societies that tend toward stasis. Think tribal societies or those ruled over by a theocracy where scientific and technological progress happens rarely if at all. However our society in the West which exists in the tradition of the Enlightenment is far from fragile. It, like all societies, contains knowledge both explicit and inexplicit about how to remain in existence. But our society is able to adapt to change. Our problem, therefore, is not so much about the number of people who are not raised “Western” or in the Enlightenment tradition who we introduce, or import from outside but rather the ideas that cross our borders that we’d prefer did not take hold. As I once wrote and later said:
Our society is unique, and unique in history, because it is singularly not rigid. It is flexible. It is designed to be maximally flexible whilst retaining its existence and capacity to incorporate new people and ideas. Of course no society can tolerate unlimited change at an unbounded rate, but the knowledge contained within our culture and institutions - all of which, in truth are contained within our minds in any given generation - makes our society especially resilient.
Resilience is a remarkable quality of knowledge, something Chiara Marletto has reflected on in her first book on “Constructor Theory” titled “The Science of Can and Can’t”. This notion of resistance in a single word captures the quality a special kind of information that gets itself copied from mind to mind generation after generation as memes. In the Enlightenment Tradition which has been explained by Karl Popper and David Deutsch as a “tradition of criticism” (a curious “tradition” as traditions traditionally have hitherto been about maintaining the status quo. However, a “tradition of criticism” maintains and even fosters change. Indeed a special kind of change: rapid progress - even accelerating progress. But rapid progress, or change, on its own is typically unstable. Yet our society since the beginnings of the Enlightenment in the 1700s or earlier, starting in The Netherlands, Scotland, and England, has been remarkably stable: evolving like a biological clade. We can look to history to see the origins of free speech, free trade and the free vote. Which is to say a proliferation of creativity, wealth and democracy - and in that order - across the nations we now associate with “The West” stretching from its modern origins in far Western Europe, across parts of Eastern Europe1 and all the way to parts of Asia more recently including South Korea and Japan as well as Northern America, and the Pacific region like Australia and New Zealand. The West is not a “place” but a gradually growing set of ideas and increasingly similar cultures (defined as groups of memes, or ideas, that cause people to behave in similar ways).
All of this is to say: we in the Enlightened and Enlightening West should expect rapid change. And rapid change can happen for good or ill. Our institutions and ideas - the tradition of criticism I have already mentioned - is an engine that helps sift good ideas from bad using the three prongs of liberty as stated above: free speech, trade and the vote. These are systems of error correction. Made an error in what you’ve said or expressed? Take it back, change your mind. Correct - move forward. Made an error in your purchase or what job you’ve taken or person you’ve hired? Return it, resign or fire that person. No one will tend to coerce you in a society that tends more towards free trade capitalism. And - what agitates people most of all right now: made an error in electing some leader? Just wait until the end of their term and you, like everyone else can correct your mistake by voting them out. That, after all, is the purpose of elections - to vote out rulers who end up making rules you do not like or failing to make rules you’d prefer they did or promised to. It is not a method for finding the best, or ideal rulers. There can be no such, anymore than the final truth will ever be found in science. New scientific explanations are like grand, but unsupported scaffolds around reality we climb upon like children on monkey-bars allowing us to glimpse vistas of ever more problems to solve: new and better opportunities to make progress. To understand things we didn’t even know we should or could understand before making that little bit of progress and understanding something of the nature of the truth about reality.
Again: no idea or explanation is perfect. No leader will be perfect. No product: perfect. Hence this need for what it is in the Enlightenment that allows us to discard choices we think we’ve made in error and make a different choice.
But within the West there is diversity. “Diversity is our strength” has become a mantra much derided and yet there is truth in it. Within a species there is diversity. The more diverse the individuals within a biological species, the stronger it tends to be. As the environment changes, members of the species may die off, but in a diverse species some members will have just the right “mutation” or “variation” to weather the change, survive, and have offspring. This is how evolution happens. But in biological species this is all mechanical and physical and extremely slow. Hence species go extinct all the time. 99.99%+ of species that have ever existed on planet Earth have gone extinct. So too, approximately for societies of humans. But in our case, as I have already said, societies in the Enlightenment tradition are resilient and survive change - even expect and welcome it.
Within our Western societies there exists diversity at the level of government systems. England, for example, very gradually evolved the modern Westminster democratic system. There, the Monarch has been diluted of almost all power. They do not make rules and thus the King or Queen are not, strictly, rulers. So there is no need to “vote them out” - that is not a measure of “democracy”. Democracy is judged by the criterion of the extent to which rules and rulers can be changed by the ruled without violence. England’s system is a shining beacon of this system where now, Prime Ministers are routinely removed even by their own party. In Australia which has a slightly adapted variation upon England’s system, elections are very often called early at the Federal level and the society flips wildly and frequently between one party then another holding sway for just few years at any time. This is rapid error detection and correction in the realm of politics. It is a form of government testing, then refuting. Creating, then criticising. Politicians know this can happen - and so do the citizens. The Prime Minister, ostensibly the most powerful person in the land, really is always on thin ice and they know it. They cannot afford to, by edict, issue executive orders as the President of the United States can for a Prime Minister is exceedingly easy to remove by comparison.
The same cannot be said for the French President, or the South Korean as recent events demonstrated: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/south-koreas-president-yoon-arrested-all-you-need-to-know. There, to be removed, “impeachment” proceedings must be held. It is a slow legal process often involving courts and 2/3 majorities in senates or congress and so on. No simple majority vote of the members of their own party will do it. And in both cases the Presidents have awesome, unparalleled power in their own nations. The “executive” branch there basically is the President.
In the USA, “The President” has more power still in many respects. For those in Westminster systems, such as throughout the Commonwealth Nations (those which were once UK colonies in the main, but not exclusively) - the Prime Minister has nothing like the power of a President. Again: they can be in power in the morning and gone by the afternoon should a simple majority of their own party disagree with them. And so there is nothing like “executive orders” that Prime Ministers can sign. Ministers in the Australian system must be serving politicians; sometimes appointed by the Prime Minister, sometimes by the ruling party. They cannot be brought in from outside to head up departments as Secretaries in the US can be.
For a long time in US politics, this ability for Presidents to wield the power of executive orders was seen more as an exception to regular law making rather than custom and tradition. But things have changed. Many trace its accelerating rate of use to recent decades. Each side blames the other for the ratcheting up of the use of executive power in government. In any case Trump noticed the custom and how effective it has been, and was elected in no small measure on the expectation he would also part ways with the first 200 years or so of the Republic to use “the executive order” to make radical changes swiftly.
All that is perfectly in accord with “The Enlightenment” no? Rapid change tempered by the customs and institutions that maintain social stability. We shall see in the months and years to come. It is an interesting experiment to see how far the pendulum can swing and how quickly and whether the whole mechanism will sway too. But we live in “accelerating” times. People in the 2020s don’t merely expect, respect and welcome change: they actually seem to want it faster and are sometimes disappointed at its unprecedented rate. The next chatGPT model is never fast enough or good enough no matter how fast the iterations come and how blown away most of us are by its “reasoning” capabilities. We are all becoming, like Louis CK said: the man complaining about the lack of wifi onboard an international flight who is nevertheless experiencing the wonders of human ingenuity that allow near super-sonic flight! See here:
We could all do with pausing and appreciating the wonders of the Enlightenment - and the accelerating Enlightenment we are experiencing.
Now it’s true that in many countries, amplified by social media, each side of politics has been going apoplectic at even the thought the other side might enact policies they simply mention out loud. And when some policies are enacted, anyone would think it truly is the end of civilisation. We exist, as David Deutsch has observed, in a peculiar “age of hyperbole”. Nothing is quite so bad, except in places where it truly is terrible and then, sometimes, things are downplayed. Take October 7, 2023. The worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the holocaust and yet, if we look at the reaction on the left and parts of what Konstantin Kisin has called “the woke right” anyone would think it was “just another” skirmish in a war where there is blame on “all sides”. Never in the history of human conflict has there been such a bright line between good and evil conjoined with a tendency to confuse the two and “both sides” the issue. “But what about the Palestinians and their suffering - aren’t the IDF going too far and being reckless?” - is the refrain of those like Piers Morgan who regards the fact he takes heat from “both sides” as a sign he is doing something right, rather than wrong.
So “what about” indeed? The people who largely voted in Hamas, share their genocidal ideology and have been allowed again and again to support terrorists among them and raise their children to do the same generation after generation. All of it is waved away as if “The Jews” have caused this. Just as supposedly it was “The Jews” who drove Hitler and the Nazis to extremis - an increasingly popular refrain among the historically illiterate on social media. The Jews have been blamed since time immemorial as David Deutsch has observed in his calling out of “The Pattern” (which I have written about at some length here: https://quillette.com/2023/11/01/antisemitism-the-sinister-pattern/
People are confused about The Enlightenment and its enemies. They are confused about how to defend not merely their own nations but the set of ideas broadly that allow for nationhood to persist, providing safety and the opportunity for improvement. They don’t know what The Enlightenment is, and in some cases, where they do, reject it outright. There are, therefore, “enemies within” as well as without. Some may be innocently mistaken or not - but they can be a danger to individuals and society because anti-Enlightenment forces tend in the direction of coercion and ultimately violence. They reject the possibility of fruitful, but peaceful confrontations between ideas because anti-Enlightenment movements tend to be utopian in their outlook. They think there are ways of organising society which are optimal and will therefore use force to insist on a perfect organisation of society rather than expecting failure from time to time due to the very nature of trial and error embedded within our Enlightenment traditions. And this, by the way, is one of the distinctions to be made between the English/Scottish/Dutch Enlightenments (true Enlightenments, hereafter simply just “The Enlightenment”) and the Continental “enlightenment”.
The Enlightenment is a recognition, in retrospect, of the inability of people to reach a perfect state - for there is no perfect state, and therefore society must always be always in a state of flux and improvement. The notion that error and missteps are inevitable in the creation of knowledge, technology and improved morality is built into the philosophy underlying how we have set up our governments and institutions. For this reason discussion should always be attempted in order to improve our ideas. Among philosophers from Kant to Rousseau and others on the European continent there was a quite adept critique of traditional religious authoritarian ways of coming to knowledge and organising society. But their failure was in seeking to replace those authorities and tyrannies with more secular or supposedly “egalitarian" versions. They believed in the power of the state to provide rights to the populace rather than protecting the rights inherent to human beings. They taught how it might be possible, in any case, with a careful application of the mind to reach certainty and so dogma was never wholly rejected. They replaced religion but not quite religious thinking: that ultimate, final Truth could be found (perhaps by science or reason more broadly) and hence the initiation of violence justified in some cases to perfect the world. They were not fallibilists in the Popperian sense.
It is no accident, therefore, that out of this philosophical confusion sprang French postmodernism and similar movements such as cultural relativism and the very modern impulse to regard “all societies and cultures everywhere” as more or less equal. Who are we to judge another people? Well, who would we be to withhold judgement? Relativists of course. And that is something The Enlightenment rejects. There is an objective difference between knowledge and ignorance, good and evil or better and worse explanations. And for this reason we can judge everything from scientific explanations through to competing national policies and ethical guidelines in light of objective standards of clarity, moral realism (what preserves the means of error correction) and the generation of better, higher quality knowledge.
So let us take that as background knowledge and survey the timely issue of Donald Trump’s recent executive orders. I am, of course an outsider not a US citizen and I have already indicated that the very notion of “executive orders” may be a fraught one. One reason for the existence of the checks and balances that is the tension between the executive, the congress and supreme court in the USA is to slow down a government's capacity to “do” anything - which is to say “do too much damage too quickly”. But the executive order cuts right through this “gridlock” in many cases (gridlock being a feature, not a bug, of a system many people think is excellent as it gives time for politicians and regular citizens to reflect upon, debate and raise, perhaps unthought of, objections to rules being made and policies being set). In any case, putting all that aside the reality is The President of the USA has passed many executive orders very swiftly and publicly and these have an effect not merely in the USA but on the wider culture of The Enlightenment and certainly the discussions happening across the world. So it is not out-of-place for an Australian to remark, once more as an outsider what this looks like in light of a background of Enlightenment ideas, checks, balances and critical discussion.
As of February 7, 2025 in Australia, Donald Trump has signed 50 executive orders according to NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/tracking-trumps-executive-orders-rcna189571 . That’s a lot in a small amount of time: more than any of his predecessors. However Clinton signed 364, Bush 291 and Obama 276. Trump in his first term only signed 220. Biden signed only 162. So there has been a trend downwards.
Let’s select some that have generated the most publicity and check for any themes as well as consistency with the above criteria I have mentioned for “good policy”. All of the ongoing Presidential Orders are being catalogued here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/
In Foreign Affairs the Department of State and Foreign Policy Broadly is to be brought in line with an “America First” idea behind “MAGA”. On the one hand this is simple common sense: all national governments should prioritise their own nations. The Japanese government puts Japan first, the Saudi government Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, nations in the tradition of the Enlightenment should not forget their allies and to defend those “means of error correction” around the world. The MAGA movement would do well not to tend in the direction of pure nationalism (my country right or wrong) but recognise that patriotism (I love my country) is only strengthened by defending ones allies and The West broadly. If the USA were to retreat much (or much more) from being the preeminent power in the world and from defending its allies militarily - from Israel to South Korea, Japan, Europe and Australia and so on, it may find that if some or many of those allies were to fall to places like China, Russia, Communism broadly or Islamism and other nefarious ideologies America First would be that much weakened by its very own impulse. However this executive order is light on detail: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/america-first-policy-directive-to-the-secretary-of-state/
The directive to utilise the military to defend the borders of the United States is consistent with the very existence of a nation itself. A nation is defined by its borders (or rather more precisely a country is). A common sense reading of the situation in the USA is that it is so attractive a place, no one is fleeing it but many are breaking in. As we defend the walls of our home and define our private property with a fence - so too our country with borders. This is simply realism: if one agrees there exist countries then one agrees there exist borders and whatever the immigration policy is, people should not simply be permitted to cross those borders without checks. This is no way suggests immigrants as a rule are detrimental to a society or social cohesion or anything of the sort. It is a realistic acknowledgement that if even some minuscule percentage of people who come into the country to settle do not merely not share the values of the host nation but are actively hostile to it, it multiplies the problems in that society. It is also an acknowledgement of the fact that even if the overwhelming majority of immigrants are net contributors to the economy because of their productive output and creativity, if some small number of immigrants are not and they enter a country like the United States where forms of welfare exist for recent arrivals, or where those crossing the borders may have been literally expelled from their home countries for law breaking it is an absurd abrogation of reason to have a porous border. Hence if civilian authorities have been unable or unwilling to effectively seal the border: let the military do it. Moreover as a visitor to places like the UK and USA I can attest to the great difficulty of simply visiting those nations: passing through customs and immigration; often paying money for visitation rights (the US non-visa VISA “ESTA” form most citizens of countries with good relations with the USA must fork over good money for). Any law-abiding potential immigrant who “waits in the queue” as it were must be frustrated, especially when places are limited and perhaps further limited by those who enter illegally.
Declaring a national energy emergency https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/ . So here we have hyperbole on the one hand. There is no risk of the USA running out of energy or facing energy shortages. However, that said: the cost of energy across the world is too high because of poor policy directed at protecting the planet rather than facilitating the flourishing of humans. Hence the content of this order which reads in part to “facilitate the supply, refining, and transportation of energy in and through the West Coast of the United States, Northeast of the United States, and Alaska” is a clear pivot back towards cheap, reliable fossil fuels which can power cars and the grid rather than the transition to unreliable so-called renewable energy sources. Although realism teaches us that fossil fuels are actually limited, we have not approached the limit yet and have potentially thousands of years of global reserves of oil, gas and/or coal. We should exploit these for the benefit of all people across the world while developing even cheaper even more reliable energy sources from fission and fusion power through to solar where it is feasible to do so. The energy market should be unregulated as far as possible and consumers allowed to choose the energy sources they want rather than it being dictated by politicians following the advice of so-called energy and climate experts. In particular the focus is on Alaska in another order where environmental regulations will be eliminated in order for LNG and oil exploration and exploitation to commence https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-alaskas-extraordinary-resource-potential/
Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government.
In conjunction with orders about hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries for children and preventing trans athletes from competing in women’s sports we have confusion on both sides of this issue. Among conservatives there is confusion about what the nature of personhood is. A mind has no gender. On the other hand there is confusion on the liberal side. Sexually reproducing organisms have a defined sex and among human beings those with XY chromosomes, hitherto called “men” are generally faster, heavier and stronger than women. Even if a person “assigned male at birth” undergoes surgery and hormone blockers, if they have passed through puberty, and almost all will have, they have an advantage in almost all sports and therefore rules around preventing men (or trans women) from competing in women’s sport is a rational thing to demand https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/keeping-men-out-of-womens-sports/ . But this should, in general, be left to the sporting bodies. Why the heavy hand of government is needed here is unclear. When it comes to conducting surgery and hormone blockers on children as young or younger than 5 - this would seem to not acknowledge the reality that sometimes children can be coerced by their parents into doing things they regret later. Some parents can coerce their child into undergoing surgery because it gives the parent “cred” or “clout” in a small community of people. As trans-woman Blaire White has observed: “a transexual child is like a vegan cat. We know who is making the decisions.” This is a difficult issue to navigate but it would seem that it simply appears to be the case that not enough is known and the increasing number of cases (silenced by woke ideology) of so-called “detransitioners” would suggest that there is a very negative set of outcomes for a large proportion of those who seek to undergo hormone therapies and surgeries at a young age. To speak plainly: many come to regret it and feel they were pressured into transitioning by parents and by a system which all too often was about affirming their bad ideas rather than compassionately criticising where they might be making an error. In other words, much of the trans movement around children has descended into rank irrationality and a denial of reality. None of this is to suggest that when a person has reached sexual maturity that they should not be able to do whatever they like with their money and their own body so long as it does not hurt, or cost, someone else. But all of this is to suggest that the content of this executive order seems in line with a rational conception of the state of our knowledge with how to reassign gender and, perhaps more importantly, how to undo surgeries and interventions children may come to regret later on. One day people may be able to routinely change their gender. But that day is not today, or on the foreseeable scientific horizon. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-children-from-chemical-and-surgical-mutilation/
Withdrawing from certain UN bodies is nothing but a good thing. UNRWA funded terrorists and alongside UNHRC the UN has become a deeply antisemitic organisation. It is good for the USA to try to correct the deeply entrenched error in ideology at the heart of the United Nations. This body is superfluous to the needs of nations who freely trade one with another and can enter bipartisan agreements or regional or cultural agreements. Supra-national bodies like the UN and EU are generally highly antagonistic to actual democracy. Their leaders are appointed, not elected, and once in power exceedingly difficult to remove despite their influence in global affairs and even day to day lives of people. The UN, for example, often guides the content of the curriculum delivered to school students across the world.
Deregulation is a good thing. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-prosperity-through-deregulation/ This demands that if a new regulation is imposed, 10 are eliminated. In concert with DOGE which, if it achieves nothing else can highlight for taxpayers where their money is being spent and increase the critical attitude of citizens towards a bloated bureaucracy. Regulation, like taxation, dampens risk taking and slows progress. Those who create wealth should be permitted to keep it and reinvest in more wealth creation ventures. The government does not create wealth. It’s purpose is to protect the wealth generation capabilities of individuals and businesses so that a society can become more powerful, more resilient, more quickly. The larger the government, the more government workers are required and the more people taken out of the wealth generation pool into the regulation pool. That is a recipe for a decline in accelerating progress.
Defending America with its own Iron Dome is a no-brainer. The most important role for a government is the protection of the rights of its citizens and that includes, obviously from the threat of missile attack whether that be from North Korea, China, Russia or elsewhere. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/the-iron-dome-for-america/
A person is a means of error correction: including of their own ideas. Even the worst could, in theory be studied to find out what causes people to become murderous. Or they might even be rehabilitated. Therefore it would be wrong to restore the death penalty. Not least because the state is fallible. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-the-death-penalty-and-protecting-public-safety/
This execute order is about tariffs: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/america-first-trade-policy/ Tariffs are always and everywhere a bad idea. They increase prices for everyone and only enrich the governments imposing them. Used as a bargaining chip, Trump seems to have had some effect in cajoling the leaders of other nations to do what he wants in assisting his government and military to protect his borders.
While the first amendment in the United States guarantees the government cannot impinge on the free expression of people, nonetheless it seems as if the Federal Government used social media companies as proxies to do so by pressuring them with the threat of fines, taxation audits or investigation by the department of Justice and so on. This executive order seems to go some way to promising such pressure will not be exerted on channels of information and platforms from here on https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship/
As we move forward over the coming three or so years where Trump’s administration is at their zenith, it is clear for many these are exciting optimistic times. Others are fearful - already claiming Trump is overstepping his constitutional authority. No doubt the Supreme Court will intervene if and when required and Congress may act as a break on any true excesses. It seems good that rapid change is occurring. The checks and balances in the system provide for stability under rapid change. But if the executive orders turn out to be errors, they can be undone rather easily either by Trump himself or his successor. In all cases the measure of government policy must remain: to what extent does it allow more rapid progress without upsetting the system itself? Does it help to foster in an economy the ability for people to conduct trial and error in the market, and in the market place of idea? Are errors being detected and corrected more rapidly? Is the means of error correction under threat? Or are free speech, free trade and voting being protected?
In the age of hyperbole it can be like looking through thick mist to see what is actually going on. So much noise surrounds every action Trump in particular takes, the signal is sometimes lost and so people “tune in” so to speak to channels of information that provide the comforting words one wants to hear. Beware of that impulse. The only solution to “it’s all interpretation” and “it’s all opinions” when media and social media become echo chambers is to compare and contrast sources in your own mind. One needs not be trapped within a “framework” of thinking or an echo chamber. One can understand the alternative perspective and ideas and one has the capacity to come to a sober and objective conclusion about what is actually going on. It takes some work, but “Fruitful Discussions” using a “Critical Method” are possible and are the way to reach reasonable conclusions about what is happening especially on topics as fraught as US politics and whether Donald J Trump is a force for good or ill in the world. For more timeless discussion of these issues, visit ToKCast on Youtube and look for my recent breakdown of Karl Popper’s “The Myth of the Framework” where the greatest philosopher of the last century has written at length about how to think about confrontations and encounters when parties to the discussion are very far apart. There has never been a better time.
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