Ask A Genius 752: Richard May Credit for Alexis de Tocqueville
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/17
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I have to give credit to Richard May for this one. It’s a quote that states as follows – “I know of no country in which there is so little independence in mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”– Alexis de Tocqueville.
Rick Rosner: Okay, sweet. So Tocqueville comes to the U.S in the early 19th century, I assume. I do kind of know what one of the pressures might have been for him to make that observation. You know the conformity America was freaking young. In the early 19th century, depending on how you figure it the fucking white boy plus slavery America is 200 years old. You go over to Europe and civilization is 2000 years old and so you got a huge intellectual artistic tradition. So, that’s got to be one thing that a bunch of farmers in the U.S didn’t have shit to talk about; they had no history, they had no culture relative to Europe.
Now if you want to apply it to today, you have, I don’t know if you’d call it variety of thought, you just have people picking their information bubbles. The liberal humanistic bubble and then the lunatic bubble, and each of those are constrained. The liberal humanistic bubble constrained by fact for the most part; the people trying to be relatively report. I mean they’re put there’s plenty of problems with the 24-hour news media but there is some effort to report the truth. The main problem is what stories get focused on but there’s quite a bit of factual information under the topics that people care about and often those topics are legitimate issues; climate change, the increasing racist fascist tendencies, and anti-democratic tendencies in the country. And so, what we talk about on social media, when we talk current events in politics is constrained by what the facts are and also by the sheer volume of information.
And then, the other side is constrained by being mainly concerned with denying the facts on the other side. So, each side is constrained by fact but if you want to look at diversity of discourse, you can look at our creative endeavors. TV is better than ever, entertainment is better than ever, video games less, so movies because just TV is the most creative medium right now. But there’s still constraint in that area because to make a superhero movie you need about 10,000 people working in various places and if it’s a Marvel or a DC movie, you’re working off a material that was written in comic book form anywhere from you know 80 to 20 years ago. And also the constraints of spending 200 million dollars on a movie, say 40 million dollars on a season of a Prestige TV series and all the execs who have their fingers and focus groups and Q ratings in there. So, plenty of constraints there and we’re such active consumers and there’s so much to consume, that that’s another constraint that we were so busy consuming other people’s thoughts and creative efforts. It helps us when we come up with our stuff but most people aren’t coming up with stuff or at least stuff that makes it to series.
[Recording End]
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