18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

This brings us to a final issue, which I think is incredibly important, which has to do with why there are no living heroes. In effect, we almost don't believe in heroism. As soon as somebody starts to make us excited about the world and what is possible for the individual, we come to start feeling terrible about that person unless they're trapped inside of a Marvel movie, or something like that. If you go back to the history of ticker tape parades, he will see that there were many ticker tape parades given for individual aviators, individual explorers, ships captains who put their ship at risk to rescue the crew of another.

 

 

And in fact this pattern or largely stopped.

My contention is that the difficult case of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh Charles Lindbergh] may have marked a turning point. In Lindbergh's case, he had flown solo to Europe from the United States and come back a hero, I believe in the late 1920s. Now, Lindbergh was a very difficult human being to deal with, because he was an authentic hero, and he was also somebody who believed in America First and in isolationism, and given the Nazi Menace in Europe, I think it's almost an unforgivable position. Nevertheless, the fact is that Lindberg commanded tremendous popularity, and that popularity could have been used to keep the U.S. out of a war.

01:02:06 What I find is that since Lindbergh it has been very rare to elevate any individual to the point where they can oppose our institutions. The Pete Seegers and Albert Einsteins of the world, who fought against McCarthyism, were a huge danger to the industry that was cropping up around anti-communism.

 

 

When it came to the Vietnam War, it was very dangerous to have popular entertainers, like John Lennon, who were against it.

We have been frightened about individuals coming to rival our institutions, in terms of power. And that's what's so great about the new revolution in longform podcasting, and all of these other forms of social media. Now, we have a great danger in that most of these platforms are mediated. We saw what happened to Alex Jones. It's quite possible that if these powerful institutions come to believe that a particular individual should be removed, they can always choose to enforce the rules in a different way. We saw recently the advent of terms-of-service changes to include deadnaming. Now if I say that Walter Carlos composed the album Switched-On Bach, or performed the album Switched-On Bach, that is a true statement. But because Walter Carlos became Wendy Carlos, I have no idea whether or not I can be accused of deadnaming. Now imagine that you have a hundred such rules, rules that are never spelled out, never clear, that can be enforced any which way to deny someone access to the major platforms. This is the great danger with this moment. We have unprecedented access, but we also have a gating function, which can be turned on at any time if we fall out of line with the institutions.  

I want to read you one tweet that has been on my mind for quite some time. This tweet came from a contributor to The Washington Post who is a professor at the Fletcher School and it said, "Good Morning Eric"—I'm going to leave out the parentheses—"So I read up on a few of your notions, and I have some thoughts, but my basic conclusion is simple: What's true isn't new, and what's new isn't true."

I think it's fantastic. I was stung by it, because at first I was under the impression that we were still living in a world in which the Washington Post, New York Times, Harvard, Stanford, what-have-you, control the major conversation. But, coming off of a recent date at the Ice House in Pasadena, which was a live gig with Peter Thiel, I started to realize how powerful this new movement is. We can reach anyone, anywhere, and I think that the Gated Institutional Narrative deserves to have the battle that it's been bruising for.  

What I now believe is that the Gated Institutional Narrative has been spoiling for a fight. We are quickly coming to the point where we have a David-and-Goliath moment. We now need to try to re-inflict the individuals who are uncorrelated, who are not particularly good at taking orders, who don't like committee meetings, who don't want to sign a loyalty oath, but who are passionately committed to the public good, and to some version of intellectual meta-honesty. We need these people to once again take up positions inside of the institutions, and I would like to, in fact, inflict myself on my favorite institution, Harvard University. The children of Harvard University have always been divided into White Sheep and Black Sheep, and there's no question that I represent Black Sheep Harvard, but I also think that one of the features of the University that makes it great is it has tolerated both its White Sheep and it's Black Sheep.  

What I'd like to do is to try to do battle with the DISC, to show you that it exists, to try to figure out how it works, and to try to show that the tools that we currently have may be powerful enough to defeat it. This is the actual purpose of The Portal, and I think even if we lose some viewers and some listeners, even if people start to see articles appearing that say how terrible the show is, and how it's trying to foment some kind of unrest, to hell with them. We are in an amazing position to try to do something new and to stand up for a lot of people who may have given up on their own original ideas, and to try to spark a revolution, because, if I'm right, the DISC has been sitting up on top of some of our best and most hopeful ideas for a way out of our economic conundrums, our military problems, ideas which have some chance of delivering us to a much more interesting and brighter tomorrow.

 

So, I hope that this is going to be at an unbelievable decade. Thank you guys for sticking with it. I'm sorry if this was a little bit long, but it was a lot to say and it was heartfelt and quite important to me to get it out, and we will return the trying to get you high quality content either in the form of in interviews what you've become used to on The Portal, or perhaps some new visual content that allows you to understand ideas that would be very difficult to communicate but for some novel means a presentation. We hope to approach the community to try to coordinate people who are eager to contribute back into the program, and maybe get a little bit of a closer relationship to our content that going forward it be influenced it a little bit and we haven't figured out all of the bugs. So thanks for being part of the initial experiment. Thanks for sticking with us. And we're looking forward to being with you in the coming year and decade ahead. So, you've been through The Portal for first solo episode of 2020. Be well everybody. Stay tuned.