Скачать или смотреть Virginia Heffernan on politics as fiction

If you’ve watched or listened to this podcast for a while, you probably know by now that Theory of Change is about stories—larger trends that happen and the narratives we tell ourselves about them.
We’re finite beings; we exist for a moment within a small slice of spacetime. To understand anything at all about externality, we have to simplify it. But sometimes simplification makes things more complicated and confusing.

The historical moment we’re sharing together is incredibly messy and confusing which is why I firmly believe that while the 20th century was the age of the economist, the 21st century is the domain of the philosopher—an era of interpretation.

That’s why I’m excited to bring you today’s discussion with Virginia Heffernan, a really fantastic writer and thinker whose work you may have seen in the New Republic, Wired, or at her Substack, “Magic and Loss.” Virginia has written a lot of great journalism over the years, but at heart, she’s a literary critic—a profession that I think is very well-suited to interpret our interesting times in which the division between text and sub-text is often impossible to delineate.

FULL TRANSCRIPT
https://plus.flux.community/p/6f0910c...


TIMECODES
00:00 Introduction
08:06 The 21st century as the return of philosophy
11:43 Oral versus written traditions
14:35 The fragile nature of reason within society
21:07 The end of purist capitalism and communism
22:14 Universities as places of public goods versus privatized goods
28:44 Jeffrey Epstein as a synecdoche of corrupt compromise
36:50 QAnon as projected right-wing Christian fear about internal predation
44:51 Lewis, Tolkien, and the rise of fictionalized group interpretations of reality
55:02 Richard Rorty's continued relevance
01:02:39 Opposition to cruelty as a guiding principle
01:09:32 Understanding why people believe lies
01:12:56 Closing thoughts and where to find more

GUEST LINKS:
https://virginiaheffernan.substack.com
https://bsky.app/profile/virginiaheff...
https://www.simonandschuster.com/book...

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ABOUT THE SHOW
Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux Community, a new content network of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.

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