Peco Gaskovski (quoted a little out of order):
Despite our astonishment at her opinion and excessive hot-takery, we didn’t stand up in self-righteous outrage and throw our young guest out of the house. We, the hosts, always expect to encounter some unusual perspectives during our supper salons. We have no intention of dismissing people and ruining relationships just because of a deviant opinion or two. The food and music also help. Outrage just doesn’t happen in the presence of beef lasagna and Frank Sinatra Live at Madison Square Garden.
I’m less concerned about what happens at our supper salons, than with what is happening in the world. Much of the internet has devolved into a gossip and confabulation machine, and AI only amplifies the half-truths and general loudmouthery in the public discourse, making it harder to see truth. Not that seeing truth was ever easy, of course.
[…]
[People grow beliefs the way June lawns grow dandelions. It can’t be helped. And every civilization is plagued with these cognitive dandelions, which send out spores that float away, land, proliferate into new dandelions. This is the way of the world. My mother grew up in a poor Balkan village where, during its heyday from around 500 A.D. (when the Slavic migrations arrived) to around 1960 A.D. (when everybody started immigrating to the West), people lived small intertwined lives, in mud-brick homes scattered around a nameless river that was just called “the river”, and everybody knew everybody.]
Villages have their priests, or maybe a wise old babushka, who can tell it to you straight. All societies need authority. At the level of civilization, authority used to belong to the Church, and later belonged to the State, and is now split between the State and a handful of vape-smoking twenty-something-year-old billionaires with a knack for coding.