Truth decay. Clever. Alternative reality? Is that anything like separate reality? Seems to me we are fundamentally retreating from democratic government and the principles underpinning that notion.
The endless acrimony has eroded the republic beyond recognition. To my estimation, the most disturbing aspect of all this is the disregard our legislators have for the consequences of their actions.
They appear not to care, so long as they can prevail. We the people do not know what to make of it.
If there is no improvement, sadly, our democracy is finished. Rome, it is said, was not built in a day.
It did not fall in a day either. The parallels are telling.

So where does that leave the crossing of the Rubicon? Ceasar himself didn't want it. His generals did. He didn't lead his troops across; he was pushed. Might we be observing something similar in the behavior of our recent national chief executives? Is corporate power pushing our elected representatives to overrun democratic norms?

Good questions all. I think me unqualified to answer them. But there is something else which has been nagging at my consciousness for maybe twenty five years. I have noticed an erosion of sorts: the steady replacement of matters of substance with matters of form. I contend this is largely to blame for the increasing divisions we witness. Form is mostly about compliance with insructions, edicts, proclamations and the like. It tends to diminish substantial importance, in favor of conformity. I suspect others have seen this. We cannot all have blinders on, can we? Yes, I am a remnant of counter-cultural upheaval. I also remember more free-thinking times, when some of us had the audacity to look for what really mattered.

Move my last comments anywhere you wish. Tell me what you find.

Have had some recent email exchanges with my brother in another country. He is the only surviving blood relative whom I have contact with. We talk about how we grew up, how those,years formed our world views about things; and how different the world is now. We are mostly agreed on notions of democracy: it is just about of bullets. After shooting itself, repeatedly, in the feet. Conflicting ideologies, all espousing the heart and soul of we the people, stumble and fumble;bicker and banter, a lot like religious fanatics, pontificating the 'one true path'. Older brother and I are pretty comfortable in our own skins, so we don't,spend too much time agonizing over others who may not be as well-situated. Seems to me (and, I think to him) that the origins of democracy have been misplaced. This has been an emergent phenomenon. PACs and SPIGs (special interest groups) are partly at fault here, but their influences come not from the people-at-large. I'm pretty sure that, had those people been more attentive; more vigilant; the PACs and SPIGs would have not gained their respective followings.(please note that vigilant is not the same as vigilante---they just look alike.)

It is, of course, more complex that what has been suggested above. I can't write a book here and you would not want to read one. Key phrases are representative democracy and participatory democracy. One must have both---not just one in lieu of the other. The PT blog discusses most of the other errors that have been committed and repeated,over a comparatively short time. I think their repetitive format is intended to track those commissions (and omissions).: we are not, it appears, learning from our mistakes. Dan Dennett must be tearing his hair out. Or else, like me, it is male pattern baldness.

Certainly representative democracy is also participatory, insofar as the representatives are voted in. It seems to me you're getting at the more basic distinction between representative and direct democracy, the kind the Athenians had during the fifth century b.c.e. My current interest in your remarks however concern the comment listed as posted at 8:48 a.m. on April 3rd, which ends with a reference to 'audacity to look for what matters'. For along with it must be coupled the audacity to express one's genuine care for what matters once you find what you're looking for. For that can sometimes bring about retaliation, as did Thersites's objection to the proposed campaign of Agamemnon early in the Iliad (II.211-242, arguably the first contientous objector and anti-war activist in the Western literary tradition), which was met by a severe beating by Odysseus (II.265-269); or a national television network cancelling the "Donahue" talk show for merely inviting a single anti-war voice among the many pro-war points of view during the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion. Indeed, even though taking off one's "blinders" installed by the state, education system, consumer-conditioning by television advertisements, or any other of the myriad ways in which the popular mind is directed away from examining the behaviors of the most powerful elements of society and its effects, can have its costs, some will do so; and in so doing, share the credit for a better informed world, in commendation for individual honesty and intellectual responsibility.

It is however the main part of your comment which to my mind carries the heaviest burden of philosophical analysis: The ancient distinction between form and substance which you apply in explanation of apparent social and political divisiveness, and goes back at least to Aristotle. For Aristotle substance (ousia) is primarily the bearer of diverse predicates which can not itself be a predicate of anything else; to wit: "this man" (e.g. Socrates); "that horse" (e.g. Bucephallus). (As a technical point, the form or "species" is itself described as a kind of "secondary" substance, since it can be seen as a particular under a larger class or "genus", but I think this can here be put aside.) The form however can also denote serviceability (cf. Metaphysics; books V-VI). An ax's form, for example, is defined primarily by its function (ergon), as one which chops wood. A cardboard ax has an ax's shape (morphe), but not its form.

With this in mind, I understand your reference to "matters of substance" and "matters of form" to be both informative and equivocal: Informative insofar as "matters" = problems and their solutions; equivocal insofar as "substance and form" can be seen as different kinds of matters: "Matters of substance" denotes the observation and analysis of the problems themselves; whereas "matters of form" denotes the pre-set paths taken in available solutions. Hence one could suggest the distinction be paraphrased as "awareness of the (substantial) problems" (related to perception and diagnosis), and "tactical form of their solutions" (related to expectation and prognosis); or again, the problem-stimulus, on the one hand, and the solution-form, on the other.

Your reference to "erosion" therefore I understand to be to the erosion of knowledge of problems by automatism of traditional solutions; of awareness by reaction, of stimulus by response; of being by doing; of thought by action. Here I heartily agree. As free, all humans are responsible for the effects of their actions. But these effects may lack sufficient prior thought to qualify as deliberate. I recall a recent chief executive in the U.S. government to have been an unintended nominee for that position, and yet those in his political party remain responsible for it. Forced to choose without thought, the individual is forced by the responsibility-claim (made by the the unconditioned understanding of her or his own freedom) into the narrow confines of customary group-behaviors and old, worn-out solutions to problems whose complexity far undershoots that of our own.

The best solution to the problem of erosion of problem-awareness by solution-reaction is therefore to retreat to the problems themselves-- to thought (attempt to understand on one's own account); and to being (accommodating one's understanding to the source of its contents).

In this relation and in deference to the forum, there might emerge from such considerations a justifiable advocacy for the Philosophy Department's return to some form of the position it obtained in earlier periods, whereby one might hear G.T.F.'s themselves beckoning to the heights of their advisors: "thallassa!", "to the sea!".

Following with amazement the saga of our last president and that large social media purveyor. I know I ought not be amazed but,alas, I am. This entire fragment of an era has been disappointing and embarrassing. But it teaches us to take zero for granted. Looks like truth decay will be with us for a foreseeable future.

Hi Philosophy Talk,

I would like to suggest your audience read Glen Greenwald’s most recent post on substack.com (5-9-21) about U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as it directly relates to your last radio broadcast. We hear so much about fake news these days, but it’s almost always in reference to Trump and right wing institutions. Lost in the process have been the blatant attacks on press freedoms by recent Democratic administrations. Our political framing seems strictly confined to discussions about Trump’s over-the-top bad behavior, meanwhile Tartuffe-like characters on the Democratic side are given a pass. It’s easy to appear good next to someone like Trump, but often hiding behind the hair-shirt displays of piety and political correctness of many prominent Democratic politicians you find an ethically compromised, profiteering, self-serving hypocrite (Senator Feinstein comes immediately to mind).

This spectacular hypocrisy of the corporate Democrats, along with the elite demographic they represent, is what’s fueling working-class rage. Let’s face it, Trump could play or act the good leader—he’s an excellent performer—but he knowingly chooses to snub traditional moral virtues associated with social elites. He behaves like an archetype capitalist pig, making Democratic Tartuffes appear to be the “lesser of two evils.” But this is not a choice between greater or lesser degrees of anything, but rather a choice between two different and opposite ideas: the idea of goodness (represented by the Tartuffes) and the idea of badness (represented by comically chauvinistic figures such as Trump). In other words, our two-party system reduces political elections to fallacious public appeals; one to the many or the mob (Trump’s cynical right-wing “populism”), the other an appeal to the few or the social elite (the corporate professional class, who quite literally during the Covid crisis have been actively profiting from conditions of social disruption, i.e., a necessary absence of political guidance or leadership).

By going out of his way to appear ignorant, brutish, and greedy by openly embracing negative stereotypes associated with working-class men of all colors, Trump appeals to those who identify themselves as commoners, our nations largest part. (Think Golden Ratio here; the whole is to the largest part, as the largest part is to the smallest.) This game being played is a mathematical one; divide the American working-class neatly in two, in order to control the whole country. The American working-class, our country’s largest part, is probably the most politically impotent demographic on earth right now (their trucks get bigger as their power diminishes, it’s so pathetic one wants to weep). As the 2014 study by Martin Gilens, a professor of politics at Princeton University, and Benjamin I. Page, a professor at Northwestern University, found, the preferences of average citizens have very little to no effect on policy-making. This is because Americans strangely permit their social elite to accumulate massive amounts of wealth, while simultaneously and irrationally still claiming to represent the interest of society as a whole.

In our Trump versus Tartuffe elections, the interests of two very different social classes are appealed to simultaneously, the many and the few. One candidate is in reality a gentleman but is appearing or pretending to be a commoner, and the other is a commoner acting or appearing to be a gentleman. We are only permitted to see the good and the bad, not the imperfect—that which is neither the good nor the bad, but exists in a mean between the two. Again, think of Pythagoras’ Golden Ratio, and think of how Socrates described both reason and the nature of the philosopher as being neither good nor bad, but in a mean between the two.

What’s lost in our two-party “lesser of the two evils” political system is the fact that imperfection and badness or evil refer to two distinctly different things. One is a physical thing, and the other is an idea “thing,” a monolithic entity complete in itself. An electoral choice between “good” Tartuffe and “bad” Trump is not a choice between two physical things at all—two actual living people—but between two ideas. But the working-class, our country’s largest part, is composed of average people, those who identify as being neither good nor bad but simply imperfect. In light of our present conditions of social crisis, we would be wise to recall that quite often it’s those who seem the most imperfect that in the end turn out to be the most trustworthy and good, while it’s precisely those who seem perfect that we later discover engage in unspeakable acts of criminality and sadism in their private lives. Appearances are deceiving, as professional sophists and genuine philosophers are well aware.

This show struck me. As Dean didn’t have a book to sell, my expectations were low, but I was impressed by his words and his thought about how to deal with the siloing and disinformation. I will make a point to listen to his show from now on.

My brain took in the very well received John Perry, as well. He is a devil for diversion, but he makes me think. If a Stanford or UC Riverside student paints a swastika, John should call them out. Whether this is disinformation or a symbol, it threatens our Democracy. Reed College students in Portland have been painting circle A s throughout Portland, Oregon, smashing windows while co-opting the masks of CoVid to carry out their antiestablishmentarianism. They, too, threaten our Democracy.

Somehow, I am less concerned by students and the young than the self-serving aged politicians and their supporters. I will ever be a Dewey philosopher, a believer in creative Democracy with full knowledge and concern for the task before us.

Not only do we need to call out the arguments of those who will listen, but we also need to structure the markets of thought that have formed to reinforce beliefs beyond the light of validation. I’m alarmed by what is going on in Arizona – recounting without credentials. I’m disturbed by voter disenfranchisement. Somehow, I have faith in the task before us. Even if not in all the actors.

Citizens United is the heart of the problem. That needs a fix.

Let’s not lose focus on the climate in all these words, either. Disinformation or not, some facts are going to come home to roost if we don’t start a serious and concerted effort to engineer ourselves out of a very poorly executed recent half-century.

Thanks for this show and most all the comments here. I am listening and thinking about your words.

Whew! The vacuum bag is HOT. I won't take sides in this one. I'll only say that politics is an ancient game, older even than democracy itself. There are always those 'pots' who wil call the 'kettles' black. That is not a racist remark. My point, I hope, has been well-illustrated the last half-dozen years. I mentioned to the Sam Harris organization today that I had heard the US national debt reached 27,000,000,000,000 dollars. Remarked that those are a lot of zeros. As a practical matter, it matters little who is in the Whitehouse right now. Government ( not the CEO) is what government does. Partisanship appears to have gotten worse. But,I don't know if that is right. It may simply be that in the lights of transparency, it is just more obvious.