Cultural Resources
Knowledge
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch (excerpts)
…Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump's approach is entirely different….
He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,... a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….
The QAnon Delusion Has Not Loosened Its Grip, Thomas B. Edsall.
“Millions of Americans continue to actively participate in multiple conspiracy theories. Why?”
“Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life” Review, Hector E. Garcia.
“In her new book, Anthro-Vision, Gillian Tett brings together two unusual complements of knowledge and expertise: finance and anthropology. As an award-winning Financial Times journalist and PhD in social anthropology. Tett provides a more comprehensive and broader perspective on the crises humanity has been facing to address the inconsistencies and blind spots she’s observed in the 21st century.” (read more)
‘Just Trust the Experts,’ We’re Told. We Shouldn’t, Richard Hanania.
“A program to put expertise on a stronger footing should involve both new laws and changes in the wider intellectual culture. Government should set up forecasting tournaments and remove regulatory barriers to establishing prediction markets,... conditional markets can provide information on the wisdom of proposed policies. .. A wide body of research shows that prediction markets almost always either tie or beat institutions like polls and committees in terms of accuracy…” (read more)
Books
Trump in a Post-Truth World, By Ken Wilber.
“In this provocative work, philosopher Ken Wilber applies his Integral approach to explain how we arrived where we are and why there is cause for hope. He lays much of the blame on a failure at the progressive, leading edge of society. This leading edge is characterized by the desire to be as just and inclusive as possible, and to it we owe the thrust toward women’s rights, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the concern for oppression in all its forms. This is all evolutionarily healthy. But what is unhealthy is a creeping postmodernism that is elitist, ‘politically correct,’ insistent on an egalitarianism that is itself paradoxically hierarchical, and that looks down on ‘deplorables.’ Combine this with the techno-economic demise of many traditional ways of making a living, and you get an explosive mixture.
It is only when members of society’s leading edge can heal themselves that a new, Integral evolutionary force can emerge to move us beyond the social and political turmoil of our current time to offer genuine leadership toward greater wholeness.”