Kudos Maya and Zahra for your superb interview. But as you know, the choir here is not your needed audience. I've copy/pasted below two paragraphs from my own current essay. They are from near its end, so have been fully set up by its preceding 15 pages. In case they pique your curiosity sufficiently to be willing to try the essay then please send me an email address to which I can send it or its URL. My best regards to you both, Keith (at kth.sewell@gmail.com)
"In reference to our now reigniting death struggle between our superstition empowered savior-strongmen and democracy this essay’s implication is that we should revisit Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote – about its being okay for his neighbors to maintain reason-antithetical belief systems so long as these didn’t pick his pocket or break his leg – and ask whether in our modern democracies, with their obvious dependence on some basic level of scientific literacy and thought clarity in the electorate as insurance against our choice of leaders who lack either, there can really be any such thing as non-pocket-picking and non-leg-breaking reason-antithetical belief systems. This essay’s overall and on-balance answer is no. It is that these systems have never been harmless in the sense implied by Jefferson's quote, and that their damage may now have escalated to the point of requiring us to choose between them and our continued survival. Observably, our superstition enabled strongmen have never yet led us into the sunlit uplands or halcyon days of our former glory that they always promise. They lead us instead, as they did in 1914 and 1939, into world wars. And our next one of these; fought as it necessarily will be with nuclear weapons and against our backdrop of accelerating and metastasizing climate disruption, really could be our last.
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We might also, and while we’re at it, revisit Timothy Ferris’ excellent 2010 book The Science of Liberty. We could then at least try to explain to our strongmen why they should – for their own sakes, in the conservation of their time, blood and treasure – be able to provide some responses against Mr. Ferris’ book full of well-reasoned and observation grounded arguments against their possibility of even medium term success. Their present position is akin to that of flat earth believers who, in response to the vast, coherent and synergistically reinforcing body of evidence for our planet being spherical simply refuse to engage with it; while the position of the rest of us seems to be meek acquiescence to their doing this. ‘The truth’ isn’t 'out there'; but the directly observation grounded knowledge through which we can see that reason, fairness and rules based liberal democracy delivers on-balance better results for all of its participants – even including those at the tops of our needed hierarchies – than our ancient superstition enabled authoritarian systems definitely is out there."
Kudos Maya and Zahra for your superb interview. But as you know, the choir here is not your needed audience. I've copy/pasted below two paragraphs from my own current essay. They are from near its end, so have been fully set up by its preceding 15 pages. In case they pique your curiosity sufficiently to be willing to try the essay then please send me an email address to which I can send it or its URL. My best regards to you both, Keith (at kth.sewell@gmail.com)
"In reference to our now reigniting death struggle between our superstition empowered savior-strongmen and democracy this essay’s implication is that we should revisit Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote – about its being okay for his neighbors to maintain reason-antithetical belief systems so long as these didn’t pick his pocket or break his leg – and ask whether in our modern democracies, with their obvious dependence on some basic level of scientific literacy and thought clarity in the electorate as insurance against our choice of leaders who lack either, there can really be any such thing as non-pocket-picking and non-leg-breaking reason-antithetical belief systems. This essay’s overall and on-balance answer is no. It is that these systems have never been harmless in the sense implied by Jefferson's quote, and that their damage may now have escalated to the point of requiring us to choose between them and our continued survival. Observably, our superstition enabled strongmen have never yet led us into the sunlit uplands or halcyon days of our former glory that they always promise. They lead us instead, as they did in 1914 and 1939, into world wars. And our next one of these; fought as it necessarily will be with nuclear weapons and against our backdrop of accelerating and metastasizing climate disruption, really could be our last.
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We might also, and while we’re at it, revisit Timothy Ferris’ excellent 2010 book The Science of Liberty. We could then at least try to explain to our strongmen why they should – for their own sakes, in the conservation of their time, blood and treasure – be able to provide some responses against Mr. Ferris’ book full of well-reasoned and observation grounded arguments against their possibility of even medium term success. Their present position is akin to that of flat earth believers who, in response to the vast, coherent and synergistically reinforcing body of evidence for our planet being spherical simply refuse to engage with it; while the position of the rest of us seems to be meek acquiescence to their doing this. ‘The truth’ isn’t 'out there'; but the directly observation grounded knowledge through which we can see that reason, fairness and rules based liberal democracy delivers on-balance better results for all of its participants – even including those at the tops of our needed hierarchies – than our ancient superstition enabled authoritarian systems definitely is out there."
Thank you Maya and Zahra for this podcast. People could really do more, but it is so hard to catch up or keep ahead.