Declining Islam in the Middle East? with Timur Kuran

January 22, 2025 01:00:09
Declining Islam in the Middle East? with Timur Kuran
The Atlas Society Presents - The Atlas Society Asks
Declining Islam in the Middle East? with Timur Kuran

Jan 22 2025 | 01:00:09

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Show Notes

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 237th episode of The Atlas Society Asks where she interviews Timur Kuran, Professor of Economics and Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, about the complex dynamics of societal change, including how historical institutions and modern pressures have shaped the role of Islam in the Middle East.

Timur Kuran is a Professor of Economics and Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. Kuran’s groundbreaking work sheds light on the complex dynamics of societal change, including how historical institutions and modern pressures have shaped the role of Islam in the Middle East. His seminal work Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification explores the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures and how this phenomenon is ubiquitous and has huge social and political consequences.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: And welcome to the 237th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jennifer Anjou Grossman. I am so excited to welcome Timur Karan. He is a expert on preference falsification as well as having done some very interesting research these past few years on the decline in religiosity in the Middle East. So, Timur, welcome. [00:00:29] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. [00:00:31] Speaker A: So first, we'd just love to start with a little bit of your background. Having grown up in Turkey. We were just chatting before we went live. The situation in Turkey there and maybe anything that might have influenced the later direction of your academic work. [00:00:50] Speaker B: I was born in New York to an Anglo Mexican mother and a Turkish father. They met at Yale, where my father was studied for six years. My mother was in the only department that admitted women at the time, the drama department. My father had, as a hobby, been interested in drama. Well, that he went to watch some plays. So my mother and that was the beginning of a long romance. Well, after my father graduated, they went to Turkey. I was three months old at that time. I grew up in Turkey in an academic family and I should say a secular academic family. And most of the people who came to our home and met around the dinner table, they came as guests, were also secular. They took it for granted in their discussions that I heard as I was growing up that Islam, the source of backwardness, had put Turkey behind and that secularism was. Was on a mitigated advantage. And also that with modernization and development, Islam would disappear. Many, many question marks appeared in my mind then. I didn't know exactly how to articulate them, but I didn't understand exactly why Islam had been a source of underdeveloped economic underdevelopment, why it was a source of repression, why it would disappear, why it existed at all. And these questions were generally not debated. Sort of the arguments that I mentioned were just taken as granted. Educated people just, just accepted them. Well, I went to. Came to the United States for, for undergraduate work and then graduate school. I didn't work on religion specifically, but these questions were always in the back of my mind. And when I became a professor, when I took my first job, I started. Started working on these questions. So questions that appeared, that popped into my mind early on did influence my academic direction and the topics that I chose. [00:03:51] Speaker A: So I first discovered your work during my research and recent interview with Todd Rose about his book Collective Illusions. But when I learned how you've spent recent years documenting a precipitous decline in religiosity in the Middle East, I knew I had to talk to you to see if you could shed light on a phenomenon that we've been tracking at the Atlas Society. I'll try to make this no longer than it needs to be, but for the past nine years we've been producing these short animated Draw My Life videos, creatively engaging young people with concepts like envy, victimhood, greed, as well of course, as objectivism. And while these videos usually draw about a million or so views in English, when we began adapting them into foreign language, we were not prepared for the fact that the Arabic versions by far drew the biggest audiences in engagement. A video that drew a million views in English would draw 6, 7, 8 million views in Arabic. So I guess part of the reason for my surprise was that again, I just assumed that young Arabic speakers would be more deeply religious and would find the reason based more secular ideas that we are advancing at the Atlas Society to be more of an anathema. So what does your research tell you? [00:05:21] Speaker B: I'm not surprised at all. Outwardly, most Arab societies are quite religious. But privately, many, possibly even most Arabs who are outwardly Muslim, who practice Islam to one degree or another, have many questions about Islam. Some of them have given up on them, some of them have actually exited it. And they are just doing what they need to do to be recognized as a Muslim in their society. The regimes in the Middle east are aware of this. They've conducted classified surveys of their own that have been leaked and they find that the percentage of atheists, percentage of people who characterize themselves as non religious or who characterize themselves as deist, believing in a fire, being believing in a God, but not in any specific religion, that this percentage is in double digits, it's in fact in double digits even in religious schools that are designed to train the next generation of religious experts, imams, religious judges and so on. In Turkey there was a classified survey done, it was leaked to the press. It found that 14% of use at religious schools characterize themselves as something other than Muslim. In Egypt, officially, the number of atheists is something a few hundred and the number hasn't, I forget the exact number, but it hasn't changed in, in many years. But a former head of Al Asar, that's the highest religious body in Egypt, has said that a substantial portion of, of the youths and even of middle aged people are not religious and have privately left Islam, that a substantial share of them are atheist. For Iran, we don't have similar, we don't have a similar survey that has been leaked. We don't Know if any has been done though. I'd be surprised if the theocracy is not conducted such surveys. But just looking at a crowd on a busy street in Tehran or Isfahan or some other Iranian city will provide many indications that Iranians are not particularly religious, that they are openly, openly defying rules of the rules of the theocracy, rules that they must follow to be considered a good Muslim. Women, for example, will, because the, in order to get by the religious police, they will cover their air, but with the smallest, smallest piece of cloth which will leave a lot of their hair, hair showing. This is, this is deliberate. Many women are deliberately defying the religious, religious police and they are according to people familiar with Iranian society, people who have lived there and gone and gone abroad. They are either atheists or they have converted to Zoroastrianism, which is an ancient religion of, of Iran or they're simply agnostic. Yeah, I think we see this across the board and especially in countries that have had a tradition of secularism, of secular. [00:10:29] Speaker A: And I wanted to kind of get into that a bit because Mustafa Akiol, who I know is a good friend of yours, he's been interviewed on this show twice. And when I ran this whole phenomenon by him, still trying to, you know, get a grapple on it, he said that many young people in these countries that they have tried these, they know the countries have been through these various isms, right. So that includes socialism and to the extent that that was more secular or nationalism to the extent that that was more secular and Islamism as well. And so they're tired of those ideologies. They know they don't work and they're looking for something new. Do you find any credence in that possibility? [00:11:21] Speaker B: Yes, yes I do. And what I find is that the most common ism now that youths are turning to is deism. It's different from all these other isms in that it is a private. It is private religiosity that does not involve taking orders from some organization. It's a very libertarian form of religion. And many of the people who are, who have become deist still continue for self survival, for just to keep their jobs, to avoid getting in trouble with authorities still protecting the motions. Go through the motions. They go to Friday prayers. If they're a shopkeeper, they, when all the shop close on Friday at noontime, they go to the, go to Friday prayers. They just go through the motions and. But they actually do the minimum and do not in private settings. When they're with trusted people, they openly Say that they are not Muslim. This is quite common in Turkey and quite common in Iran and Egypt as well. [00:13:04] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's back up for a second now with your research. Are you mainly relying on these leaked surveys? Are you able to do any research in the field? And how does one even begin to go about measuring religiosity in the Middle east or anywhere else for that matter? [00:13:29] Speaker B: It's difficult in doing surveys is difficult, and that's how one has to to with some countries. One has to rely on leaked surveys. The World Value Survey is conducted in a number of countries in the Middle East. Some of them do not allow you to ask the question of whether you believe in God, whether you are and. Or to. They can't ask the question about religiosity. How religious are you on a scale from 1 to 5? These types of questions that are asked all around the world are asked in some Middle Eastern countries, not others. Private researchers who try to conduct surveys in some of these countries, including Egypt, including Saudi Arabia, are prevented from asking questions, asking sensitive questions on how religious people are and what their religious belief is. So that is difficult. That is difficult. But we do, we do have researchers who, who live in, in these countries, in neighborhoods, in cities, and observe that religiosity is often performed just to protect one's reputation rather than out of religious belief. [00:15:21] Speaker A: So, you know, how long has this research been going on? And I ask that because I'm wondering if this has been kind of a gradual decline or are we talking about something more precipitous that is really happened or accelerated in recent years? [00:15:40] Speaker B: It's a very, very good question. It's. We don't really know, but it appears to have taken off around the time that the Internet became common. And people who had questions about Islam, people who were struggling with various questions of who they are, what they really believe in, could find each other through social media. Another factor is that around the time that the Internet was becoming widely available in the Middle east and social media were emerging, Islamism was discrediting itself across the region. Think about the Iranian theocracy, that is, that is widely perceived as very corrupt and very repressive. Think about the disappointments generated by the Erdogan regime. Initially, it, initially it was quite popular, but then it started becoming repressive. It started forcing religion onto people. So these two things coincided and it has been a gradual. It's been a gradual process of slow increase since then. [00:17:12] Speaker A: Interesting. So one another. [00:17:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yes, of course. [00:17:17] Speaker A: One other question I had. You know, I'll give A little bit of background on why this has been so fascinating to me. I didn't mention before, when I was at Harvard, I actually took an accelerated five years of Arabic. I was thinking that I was going to go into the Foreign Service and I did my thesis on the Hashemite regime in Jordan. So when we saw these huge numbers, I started to drill down a little bit to see if it was, you know, everywhere or if it was, if these views were coming from one area. And we did see kind of outperformance in Egypt, in Algeria, in Morocco. And then you also look at other research when different nationalities leave the Middle east and go to Europe, for example, Algerians having the highest intermarriage rate. So what is your understanding? And I know it can't be exact, but is this happening more in one place rather than another, or is it across the board? [00:18:27] Speaker B: There's certainly variations. We don't have enough data. We don't have standardized data that would allow us to quantify how much is happening in one place versus the other. It appears, though, that in countries that have suffered from Islamist repression, it is more common. And another factor is where the possibility, where it's possible to go against Islam, to criticize Islam without being lynched by a mob, without suffering very dramatic consequences. It's. We see the reactions to Islamism, we see that they're more visible in those places. We have to be careful, though, that what we observe need not be a perfect reflection of replies under the surface. You can have people who are private, who have privately given up on Islam, privately, who have converted to some other religion, who have decided they're deists rather than Muslims, but publicly, you don't see. You don't see the. The signs. [00:20:07] Speaker A: So it's certainly a very fascinating phenomenon and development. And I do want to get to our audience questions as well as talk a little bit more generally about the main body of your work of preference, falsification. But I guess maybe we could just take a moment to talk about what the implications of this decline in religiosity might mean for the Middle east and really the region. [00:20:35] Speaker B: I think that one consequence or one possible consequence will be the emergence for the first time of a liberal variant of Islam. There have been many schisms in recent years, all coming from the stricter side. We fed isis, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other such movements that all demand a purer form of Islam, a stricter form, a more rigid form, a less tolerant form of Islam. But there are huge numbers of people in the region who interpret Islam differently or would like to to like Islam to be interpreted differently. They would like exits from Islam to be free just as entry into Islam is is free. They they would they would like to have more options. They would like to if they're going to be a part of the religion. They would they would like that to reflect from what comes comes from within. We are now seeing with with the with the shares of deists and people who consider themselves non religious and people converting to some other religion secretly all across the region. What's missing is an organized liberal Islam or version of of. Of Protestantism in in Islam. That and the the potential is there. There is a big constituency. Some of the people who are who are becoming atheist or or deist themselves find a liberal variant of Islam to be to their to their liking. The potential is there. But there is no leader. And of course there are many people. You mentioned Mustafa Akiol, he's one of them. I discuss his work of my own recent book Freedoms Delayed. There are thinkers who studied Islam and produced liberal version of Islam from basic fundamental sources of the the religion. The ideas are there, but we don't yet have a leader who can confound or a group of people confound new variant of the religion with its own places of worship, with its own funds and so on. But the potential is there and this would be huge because it would open up debate in the Muslim world on Islam on its interpretation on what is what is the essence of the religion and what is just a custom, perhaps a pre Islamic Arab custom that is that has become associated with the religion but isn't part of the the core and the opening up of discourse, of. Of public discourse. [00:24:40] Speaker A: Oh be it would be great on on so many fronts. I mean it would be great for trade, it would be great for peace. [00:24:46] Speaker B: You know, great for innovation, for, for. [00:24:49] Speaker A: Innovation a lot of different things and for women. So I'm going to get to a few of these questions. A lot of them I think we've already covered with your answers to my previous questions. But my modern Gault asks, is there evidence of Islam rising or declining outside of the Middle East? Do followers decline over time or do those numbers get replaced by new Muslim immigrants? [00:25:16] Speaker B: It's a very good good question because this phenomenon that I'm that I've identified is specific to the Middle east. And the Middle east happens to be within the wider Muslim world, which contains about 56 countries that are majority Muslim. Those countries in the Middle east, which I define as the entire Arab world, plus Iran plus Turkey Those in the Middle east are much more repressive than societies elsewhere. There is less. There is. There is less disillusionment with Islam in other countries that are substantially, on average, substantially freer, not only in terms of religious freedoms, but expressive freedoms generally, but freedoms, Internet freedoms, social freedoms, women's freedoms and so on. So I think this is. This phenomenon of widespread covert exits from Islam is at the moment especially pronounced in the Middle East. Islam is, as a religion on the whole, it. Islamic growing. It continues to compete with Christianity in Africa, which is pretty much the only part of the world where population is growing rapidly. And there has been for decades a competition between Christianity and Islam to convert people there. Islam is still advancing, as is Christianity there. [00:27:17] Speaker A: Interesting. Interesting. You know, I. I think I would have almost thought it was the opposite. But what you are saying is that these, in these countries that are both religious and authoritarian and are trying to maintain religiosity by these more stringent measures, that it's actually backfiring. Maybe you'd talk a little bit since it is very close to your home. Is President Erdogan in Turkey and how he has tried to bring back religion there? How is, how is that, what kind of effect is that? [00:27:59] Speaker B: Having he came to power now 22 years ago, he committed himself to creating a pious generation. And to that end, he imposed religion, mandatory religion classes in schools. He dramatically increased the number of religious schools where, as opposed to the secular schools which still exist and in many neighborhoods, essentially forced kids to go to a religious school because the closest secular school was far away. And so the deliberate strategy to make the population more religious. Well, what has happened is this has, as you pointed out, it has backfired. Religiosity is declining in Turkey. Mosque attendance, as far as we can tell, is declining. The major mosque that he built on a huge hill in Istanbul has on some days, this is. This is a massive congregational mosque that can take thousands and thousands of people. On some days you go and you see a total of 15 or 20 people using the mosque for praying. It looks like a European church on a typical day. European churches are the great cathedrals of. In Europe where religiosity has declined greatly. So it is actually backfiring. And of the people who are still attending at least Friday service, a substantial portion are doing so for show. [00:30:18] Speaker A: Interesting. Here's a question that caught my eye from Lock, Stock and Beryl. Good to see you again, my friend. Why did the Arab Spring fall apart? [00:30:30] Speaker B: Now, that's also a very good question, and I address it directly in My latest book, Freedoms Delayed. The Arab Spring was not generated by organized groups. It was a spontaneous eruption of people who were coordinated over the Internet. And even the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the largest non state organization in the, in the Middle east, even the Muslim Brotherhood stood on the sidelines until it was close, clear that Mubarak was falling. But when Mubarak was toppled, there was no organization or no organizations I could say, that were strong enough and had a substantial enough base apart from the Muslim Brotherhood to carry forward the reforms. Civil society is very weak in all across the Middle east and in Egypt. And this has historical reasons. Civil. The Middle east entered the 20th century with a very weak civil society. Just very briefly, because I spent six, six chapters identifying why the Middle east did not have a concept of a corporation that was absolutely essential to the development of civil society in Western Europe. Schools, religious orders, professional organizations all got organized as corporations. And this enabled them to become powerful, to get seats and ultimately get seats at the political bargaining table. The Middle east didn't have anything similar to this. The closest analog in the Middle east was a trust known as the waqf. It did not have legal personality, it could not, it was not self governing. It was governed from the grave by the, by the founder, and it did not play a political role. So the Middle east and the Middle east has been building a civil society from a very weak base in the, in the 20th century. And the authoritarian rulers that have been able to cement power and stay in power for decades because, partly because civil society is so weak have made a point of keeping it as weak as possible. Egypt is a very good example. Civil society was very weak. There were no organizations that, that could constrain the military after the Arab Spring, with the exception of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it is the Muslim Brotherhood that won the first election, came to power, but the military regrouped and toppled the Muslim Brotherhood and there's now a dictatorship that is even harsher than the Sisi dictatorship is even harsher than the Mubarak dictatorship with the Arabs brain toppled. [00:34:25] Speaker A: All right, well, we're starting to get some questions coming in here on preference falsification, which of course I mentioned that my interview with Todd Rose brought your work to my attention. I think you coined the term preference falsification back in the 80s. So before we even dive into some of these questions, maybe you would tell us what the term means and why do people feel the need to fit in in the first place? [00:34:54] Speaker B: The preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one's Preferences in public in response to perceived pressures. The pressures may or may not be that the perception may or may not be accurate. It could be that everyone at the dinner table or a certain topic comes up agrees with you, but you suspect that people would object, would, would criticize you if you express your honest opinion. And it could be that everyone else at the table is doing exactly the same thing. So you could be privately in agreement, there could be a consensus, a private consensus. And publicly you're all paying lip service to something else. So that is, that is the act of preference falsification. The second part of your question was if you could just. [00:35:57] Speaker A: Why do people want to fit in? Yeah, why? I guess because I've never had that inclination. [00:36:04] Speaker B: People want to. People feel a need to falsify their preferences, first of all to avoid punishments, to avoid ostracism, be accepted by groups. The academics want to be accepted as somebody reasonable. They don't want to be cancelled. So they may avoid voicing certain opinions, voicing certain objections to university policies. They want to get their article to develop a reputation as a right wing nut, let's say to an anger journal editors. They also falsify their preferences for to get rewards. People who voice certain preferences are considered more moral. They are given. They qualify by virtue of what they're saying publicly for favors the administration favors from leaders of their profession. [00:37:31] Speaker A: So yeah, so there obviously are benefits to preference falsification. What are some of the drawbacks for individuals who are misrepresenting their views? [00:37:45] Speaker B: So psychologically when we falsify our preferences, we feel diminished. We feel that there's a part of us that we can't, that we are not. That is being suppressed. We feel victimized because of that. We also feel that insofar as others are imitating us, others are looking to us for leadership, that we're letting others down. Were playing a part in maintaining an inefficient status quo. We're playing a part in letting somebody's reputation be destroyed by not speaking up, by not saying what we really believe. This generates a lot of. This generates guilt. This generates a feeling of victimization. And of course, when preference falsification spreads and it becomes. When the context in which we falsify preferences broaden the feeling of victimization, the bad feelings, the guilt grows and that that's an explosive situation. [00:39:12] Speaker A: Of course, I mean guilt, I would say fear for sure. One thing that we focus on here at the Atlas Society, well, our audience is largely young people and I've had experts on intergenerational Differences come on to talk about like what is unique to Gen Z, for example. One of the things that they found was that they were really high in terms of cynicism as well as fear. And maybe that is because they really were coming in coming to age in an era where social media was also exacerbating the extent to which certain narratives were being maintained. And yeah, but academia has probably got to be the worst. So I've got some interesting questions. Candace Morena, who is a big fan of your work by the way, asks about Duke University. Has it come out with a statement regarding the new executive order regarding affirmative action? How do you think academia across the US is going to respond? [00:40:28] Speaker B: Duke has not to date adopted institutional neutrality or committed itself to recommitted itself to academic freedoms or free speech the way quite a few others, about 20 other peer institutions have done. But there is a faculty group that is pushing the university in that direction. I do not yet know since the executive order nullifying the executive Lyndon Johnson's executive order of 1965 just came out just a few hours ago. I do not know how the Duke University administration is going to respond. Respond I can I am pretty sure that a majority of the faculty privately are delighted. Affirmative action is unpopular among faculty, although publicly few of them will say this. The Duke Chronicle ran a poll last at the end of the last academic year among our 5,500 faculty and asking questions about institutional neutrality and questions and there was a question about dei. A super majority of the faculty had very serious reservations about DEI and they favored institutional neutrality. But an initiative, a faculty initiative that I'm a part of to get faculty to put this in writing, go public with their with their request for institutional neutrality. They're feeling that their preference for stronger academic freedoms, strong and stronger protections for free speech. Only 3% of our faculty so far. [00:42:53] Speaker A: Have been willing to come and forward. [00:42:58] Speaker B: This is an indication of massive preference falsification on campus and I have talked hundreds. Yes. [00:43:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Another example of preference falsification might be what we Iliacin is asking in this question and wanting to know whether you have any insights into the whole Covid time with the perceived kind of rising support for authoritarian measures, censorship since COVID and the 2020 elections. Is that playing a role? Might that also be subsiding as well? [00:43:41] Speaker B: It might be subsiding. I certainly hope that it subsides. That's a very good example of preference falsification generating a massive divergence between private preferences and public preferences. Private knowledge and public knowledge. Even in a in A country where the Constitution guarantees free speech. The fact institution guarantees free speech doesn't mean that people will exercise it. [00:44:22] Speaker A: You know, it's. It's not enough to have a First Amendment and constitutional protections. We really need to foster and cultivate a culture a of free speech. And we need to do that by exercising our own free speech. Okay, we've got less than 15 minutes and I know there are some questions here that I really wanted to get to. We talked about the harms for individuals when they falsify their preferences. I want to talk about the consequences for an organization or a movement. For example, at the Atlas Assessment Society, we promote open objectivism, which emphasizes civil debate and discussion with those who hold different views. Then there is the whole closed objectivists who hold that such a discussion would constitute a sanctioning of those views. To the extent that some would not even be willing to come on my show, they would consider that immoral. So how effective can such a closed approach be to maintaining a certain orthodoxy over time? [00:45:36] Speaker B: You have an orthodoxy in an organization, regardless of what the orthodoxy is and regardless it's the merits of the orthodoxy when it emerges. If it is not challenged, if it is not constantly challenged, as conditions change, as preferences change, as opportunities change, if there isn't a culture of freely questioning the orthodoxy, of freely pointing to its defects, of freely pointing to the need for rethinking a part of the, the package, the sanctioned package, then the. The organization is going to become dysfunctional. There will be disillusionment. There will be people who start disagreeing with the, disagreeing with the movement, and feeling uncomfortable with the movement, with the organization, but initially not being able to say something. But eventually these inner pressures will increase and at some point they will blow up. And it might happen at a time when the organization is greatly weakened precisely because it hasn't along the way been responding to the insights of its members, its. [00:47:14] Speaker A: Its. [00:47:14] Speaker B: Its employees. [00:47:18] Speaker A: Well, as Ein Rand herself would say, you know, you can avoid reality, but you can't avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Now. [00:47:27] Speaker B: Very well said. [00:47:28] Speaker A: I'd like to kind of get into some, maybe perhaps even historical parallels between various events that you've written about in history. Things like the Bolshevik Revolution or the French Revolution. These seemed rather shocking at the time. People were not expecting them. But you said that they could be explained to an extent by preference, falsification. Are there any parallels with what we might be experiencing in America? I mean, people have found the whole Brexit or Trump's election and reelection as shocking. So are we seeing parallels with regards to preference falsification, which, if it hadn't happened, these things might not be. Such people wouldn't be so blindsided. [00:48:19] Speaker B: Yes, there's, there's certainly parallels. Let me start with the revolution. Some of the greatest, the most consequential revolutions in history, including the French Revolution, the 1960s, 2017 Russian Revolution, the Iranian revolution that shook the Middle east, the Arab Spring, we talked about these came as a huge surprise to everybody concerned, including the world's leading intelligence organizations. One of the reasons is that in all of these cases, you had oppressive regimes that were not allowing people who had become disillusioned, people who wanted something different, people who wanted their needs addressed, that they were not allowed to speak openly, and they were forced to pay lip service to the existing regime's greatness. So what happens is that in a situation like that, as discontent increases, the degree of preference falsification increases. You just need some event that will make a few people say, enough is enough. I'm just going to. I am fed up with this regime. And they go into the opposition and they start a cascade that brings down the regime. This is what we saw this in the case of the Russian Revolution, we saw this in the case of the Iranian Revolution. We saw it in the Arab Spring. The opposition at some point just started growing, feeding on. On itself, until the opposition became so large that the regime could no longer govern. Now, in a, In a democratic society, one where you do have regular elections, it's, you're not going to have a situation, you're not going to have executive. Exactly the same situation, because there will still be people who will be expressing their opposition. And certainly before, when Trump ran in 2016, polls were showing that a substantial portion of the American electorate was favorable to Trump and was. Was opposed to Hillary. But there were enough people who were, who were not telling pollsters the truth. They were afraid to say, even to a pollster, that they might not have even known personally that they would vote for Trump. They pretended to be a Hillary supporter, and, of course, the rest is history. They went into the ballot box, voted for Trump, and that was the 2016. [00:51:50] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get to this term that you've used, preference cascade. I think you've argued that, you know, with the inauguration of President Trump earlier this week, you suggested that his success might be linked to a preference cascade where individuals felt more comfortable expressing previously hidden sentiments after seeing others do so. I've heard other terms like permission structures being created by people who are willing to go out there. And say things others are too afraid to be true. So do you think that that has been at play here, particularly with more and more in the tech world voicing their support? [00:52:39] Speaker B: Absolutely. Another term that I would like to introduce here is the Overton Window. The Overton window is the range of facts, arguments, claims that can be expressed publicly in the tech world. That Overton window broadened before the election, and the same happened in other parts of society. A big factor in this was the. Was the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. Not only was the algorithm changed, did Elon Musk change the algorithm so that so. So that previously, previously deprioritized tweets or posts would get more priority. That in itself was a big shift and it made people who had reservations about the previous the orthodoxy that Twitter had been promoting. The people with objections realized that they're actually more. Their views are more common than they had previously thought. Another factor though, is that Twitter, or when it became X, changed the. The. The made an important change to how the like function works. Previously you could see if, if a certain post had been 30 people had liked it. You could see who those 30 people were. Musk changed it so that only the person who had sent the. The post or the tweet could see who had liked it. Other people could not. So people felt people who liked controversial posts felt freer to like posts than they were in the past. And Musk also said that likes would get greater weight than reposts in where they would appear in where the post would appear in people's feeds. Now, the important difference is that it is now private preferences that is driving whose voice will be heard rather than public preferences. So I think this played an important role in getting a preference for preference cascade on various issues, various controversial issues, whether it's the, Whether it's affirmative action or the role of. The role that race and ethnic identity play in. In various spheres of life, whether it's. Whether it's the use of pronouns. The open window widened dramatically and that's encouraged. As the window started widening, that encouraged further widening. That gave people the courage. [00:56:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't know about that change. And I think that's a really positive development because, you know, previously the Puritans, if you will, to use a term from Brendan O'Neill and Andrew Doyle had been out there and if they saw that somebody of their tribe had liked a post that they're not supposed to like, I mean, this could lead to people having to apologize or get canceled or even resign. So I think that Being able to get more integrity, more alignment between private and public is going to be a very good thing. But I think we also need to take care that we don't kind of fall victim to preference falsification on the other side. Because, I mean, if you look across all of these different tech companies, they are people that work there donate overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly to Democrats. And so we wouldn't want to have such situation where people that are making private donations to support particular candidates now feel, oh my goodness, it's Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and this one and that one and that they begin to, you know, falsify their preferences to we. [00:58:02] Speaker B: Can get another one orthodoxy getting replaced by another. Ideally, we have, we have free speech and we have ideas just battling each other constantly. [00:58:14] Speaker A: All right. Well, as we are continuing to move forward in that battle, professor, where is the best way for people to follow your work? [00:58:26] Speaker B: Well, my website for the papers I write and, and other academic work. But I'm active also on on X. I comment daily on events of the day, on academic developments, on university affairs. And so that's another place to, to. [00:58:59] Speaker A: Follow me and engage. And we will do that. So this has been absolutely delightful. I've been really looking forward to this for a long time. So thank you, Professor. I really appreciate your being with us today. [00:59:13] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. [00:59:17] Speaker A: And I want to thank all of you who joined us, asked your very smart questions, of course. If you like our work, please. Sure. To support us. We are a nonprofit. And professor, if you have young people that you think would like to go to our student conference in Austin this coming June, we'll also put that link in the chat. And I want to encourage those of you who are not, you don't have to be in college. You could be young adults. You should apply, get a scholarship to come and join us. I would love to see you there. Be sure to join us next week when author Brendan O'Neill rejoins us to talk about his latest book after the Poetry Program7 October Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. So we'll see you then.

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