Why do some societies become creative powerhouses while others stagnate?

 

Johan Norberg

Any decent artist could have created realistic characters, with volume, physical weight and a spatial presence, with the use light and color to suggest distance, because that is after all, what the world looks like. So why was the Renaissance painter Giotto the first one to do it in 900 years?

Or take the flying shuttle, which helped to make weaving much more productive during the Industrial Revolution. It required no special knowledge and only took some string and two wooden boxes on either side. And yet, for 5,000 years, no weaver tried it.

Why do we suddenly get an explosion of creativity and progress in certain places and moments – and why do they end? That is what I examine in my book Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (Atlantic Books). 

I have learned that ages become golden because they imitate and innovate. They first emerge because of cheating. They didn’t come up with all the innovations that made them prosper; instead they took them from others.

Athenian, Italian and Dutch merchants picked up new ideas on their business trips. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Romans constantly absorbed peoples, ideas and methods by conquest, and Abbasid Baghdad actively sponsored a translation project to lay their hands on the world’s knowledge and science.

But there is a limit to how far imitation can get you. To make this progress self-propelling, these cultures had to combine these inputs with their own thoughts to create innovations, from higher agricultural yields to artistic rebellions. This takes inclusivity back home. People have to be allowed to try new things. Free speech, free markets and a rule of law that constrains the arbitrary actions of rulers leave room for this. 

But get Giotto and the flying shuttle, it takes something more: a broader culture of optimism. Innovation is difficult and controversial, and the results are never guaranteed. Therefore, you need a sense that there is hope and possibility, and you need role models around you who have shown the way, to make it seem like it is worth trying. Others to be inspired by, learn from, and to compete with.

This progress sometimes became self-sustaining because, at a certain point, it started transforming the self-identity of these cultures. That is why we often see clusters of creativity, like philosophy in Athens, art during the Renaissance, classical music in Vienna and technology in Silicon Valley.

Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a clue to the decline and fall of golden ages.

It is as if history has a Great Status Quo Filter (similar to the hypothesis about the Fermi paradox on why we have not encountered alien life despite the likelihood that it exists). Civilizations in every era have tried to break away from the shackles of oppression and scarcity, but increasingly they faced opposite forces, and sooner or later these dragged them back to earth.

Elites who have benefited from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them, groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy, and aggressive neighbors are attracted to the wealth of the achievers and try to kill the goose to steal its golden eggs. However, outsiders can kill and destroy, but they can’t kill curiosity and creativity. Only we can do that to ourselves.

When under threat, we often seek stability and predictability, shutting out that which is different and unpredictable. All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment in times of crisis, when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange. They started to support strongmen, control the economy and abandon international exchange. This made the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limited access to other possibilities and restricted the adaptation and innovation that could have helped them deal with the threat.

Where does that leave our civilization? The present Anglosphere age, started by the Industrial Revolution and carried on by the American Revolution and the liberal world order after the Second World War has been the most golden so far, since it has also been global. For the first time, improvements in living standards and opportunities have not been limited to one region.

Since 1820, the share of people in extreme poverty globally has been reduced from more than 8 out of 10 to fewer than 1 out of 10, and life expectancy shot up from 30 to 74.

As we have learned from history, however, nothing is forever. The question is, is the great filter in front of us or behind us? My conclusion is that it is never behind us once and for all, because the forces of reaction and tribalism exists within human nature and we carry it with us wherever we go. It can return and threaten us at the most unexpected moment, but it does not mean that it will win.

I don’t think that the American-led world order will be destroyed from the outside. There are too many countries and populations who see their interest in open trade and a rules-based order, and that choice gives them more innovation and growth in the long run. But it can all be torn down from the inside, by regulations and unsustainable debts, by erecting walls, trade barriers and unconstitutional strongman rule.  

As Abraham Lincoln said about the risk of an end to the American experiment in 1838: “It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

That is our choice today as well. But we have an advantage over earlier golden ages, because we can learn from their successes and their mistakes. We know what we should do, to try and rediscover that sense of life, that sense of wonder, and fight for openness and liberty, to rebuild a culture of optimism. In the end, golden ages are a choice.

“Open Socrates” encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking

 

In “Open Socrates,” the scholar Agnes Callard argues that the ancient Greek philosopher offers a blueprint for an ethical life.

Jennifer Szalai

Maybe this is the year that you have resolved to drink less and exercise more. Or maybe you want to be kinder, gentler and more caring to the people around you.

In “Open Socrates,” Agnes Callard suggests that self-improvement, at least as we usually understand the term, isn’t so much a matter of willpower, but of ideas. It’s not that we are weak-willed creatures, who know what “the good” is and then fail to pursue it; it’s that we haven’t given enough thought to what “the good” is in the first place. “The hard work of struggling to be a good, virtuous, ethical person” is, “first and foremost, intellectual work,” she writes.

Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is aware that “more intellectualism!” isn’t exactly an easy sell, which is undoubtedly why she waits until Page 129 to describe her chosen approach as “hard-line intellectualist.” But she is so earnestly excited by her subject that even a skeptical reader is bound to feel a swell of enthusiasm as she makes her full-throated case for a life of the mind. She wants her book to do double duty: advance a “neo-Socratic ethics” that can pass muster with her fellow philosophers, and offer lay readers an accessible introduction to how “living a truly philosophical life” can “make people freer and more equal; more romantic; and more courageous.”

This is a book that is charming, intelligent and occasionally annoying. The irritation is wholly appropriate: Socrates, whom Callard affectionately calls a “wet blanket,” was known for challenging his interlocutors to the point of exasperation, pushing them to think harder about whether what they had just said was what they truly meant. “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular,” Socrates ruefully reflected, after having alienated a number of powerful politicians in Athens and before being sentenced to death. Callard was so enthralled by Socratic philosophy as a college student that she wanted to “be Socrates” and set out to hound strangers at an art museum with big questions about the meaning of life. “They felt trapped,” she recalls now, “and I felt not at all like Socrates.”

Socrates died in 399 B.C., and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of writing about him or his thought. But Callard says that Socrates has too often been “diluted”: treated like a “sauce” that could enhance one’s critical thinking instead of as the main event, whose ethics, if properly understood, were nothing short of radical. He called himself a “gadfly” and also a “midwife” — refuting his interlocutors’ falsehoods but also helping them bring true ideas into being. The acts of destruction and creation were connected, arguably even one and the same. Refutation was never to be done for its own sake; only by helping to peel the scales from people’s eyes could they see the world anew.

Following Socrates’ example is a lifelong pursuit. All too often, Callard says, we react instinctively to “savage commands”: doing something because it is dictated to us in the moment by our body (to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) or by social bonds (to pursue pride and avoid shame). Such commands make us “waver,” she says, and contradict ourselves: “They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don’t last.”

The question of time comes up a lot in “Open Socrates.” There is, most obviously, the matter of our limited time on Earth, and Callard agrees with Socrates that philosophy is preparation for death. Thinking more deeply about what we know and what we don’t pushes us beyond our usual (unthinking) habit of “getting through the next 15 minutes.” She opens her book with the example of Tolstoy, in his “Confession,” recalling how his 50-year-old self suddenly wasn’t sure what any of it — love, children, worldly success — was for.

Callard’s name may be familiar to those who have read a profile of her in The New Yorker. She left her first marriage, to another philosopher, to marry a graduate student, also a philosopher. She talks as if love is an ecstatically intellectual pursuit, at least when it’s going well. In “Open Socrates,” she describes how we can get so caught up in our own thoughts that we don’t let evidence from the world in; another person can reveal to us our own blind spots, nudging us just so in order to see what we were missing. Socratic inquiry, with its emphasis on dialogue, reveals thinking as a communal process: “In the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone.”

I find this notion inspiring, even if I’m not as confident as Callard that “our most fundamental wish” is to be treated “as an intellectual thing.” She puts so much stock in the power of thought that she suggests it can get us out of the most intractable dilemmas: “What appears to be a difficulty with life” is “in fact a difficulty in our thinking about life.”

But she also allows that “thinking about life” isn’t necessarily guaranteed to yield the knowledge one seeks. Socrates used to say that he knew nothing other than the fact of his own ignorance. Despite some of her grander pronouncements, Callard invites us to think alongside her. “Open Socrates” encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking.

The West should be worried: “DeepSeek” hints that China has mastered the art of kaizen

 

he Japanese concept of continuous industrial improvement helps explain Beijing's technological success.

Leo Lewis

During the height of the space race, America spent millions of taxpayer dollars developing a pen that would work in zero gravity. Faced with the same problem, the Russians used … a pencil.

This is, in fact, a fictional tale. Both sides first tried pens and eventually used the Space Pen, a product developed entirely by the private sector. But the myth often returns as an industrial, geopolitical, and ideological parable, because it encapsulates the fear that runs through all of these realms: that the opposing company, position, or economic model might be better structured to work smarter and cheaper.

Did the Space Pen meme make a comeback this week, as investors and governments were wowed by China's supposedly low-cost model of artificial intelligence [AI]? DeepSeek, wondering if US export controls had backfired and losing faith in the billions invested in the more expensive American approach to the same problem? Of course they have.

But the most worrying term of the moment has to be kaizen – the Japanese concept of “continuous improvement” that once struck fear into the hearts of corporate America and which China, in one way or another, seems to have quietly mastered – in part by hiring Japanese kaizen masters who were undervalued in their own economy.

Kaizen became a real part of the international business lexicon in the 80s, when American and European companies needed to understand why Japanese companies were beating them – both on price and quality – in industries such as automotive, consumer electronics and semiconductors. Both sides identified the difference as a patient and deeply Japanese improvement of product and process.

The practical effects of kaizen were extraordinary: they were one of the main reasons why Japan's economy became a superpower in the 1970s and 80s and why many of its companies still remain global competitors in a wide range of manufacturing sectors.

But perhaps even more remarkable is the evolution of kaizen during Japan’s decades of economic stagnation after the bursting of the financial bubble. As the era of financial excesses faded, kaizen became a survival superpower: a mechanism for simultaneously increasing quality and reducing costs in tough times. Deflation and the inability of Japanese manufacturers to secure pricing power in their domestic market turned cost-cutting into a veritable art.

Chinese manufacturers, long focused on cost and technology, have carefully observed this entire process and found ways to make kaizen a part of them. DeepSeek may represent a major advancement in software, but it is an achievement built on the foundations of a hardware sector that is moving forward relentlessly and continuously.

Many would argue that China’s technology acquisition has been, at best, opportunistic and, at worst, dishonest. When outright theft or coercion is not to blame (which is often the case), foreign companies have lost key technologies due to poor transfer agreements or over-optimism about their ability to protect intellectual property. But that doesn’t explain everything.

In China’s most recent and visible industrial achievements – the production of low-cost, competitively priced electric cars, consumer electronics, industrial machinery, high-speed trains and robots – a version of kaizen is already at work. And there is reason to suspect that the Chinese version could work for a faster, more disruptive period and with more visible results than the Japanese original.

First, China has the human resources and talent to apply kaizen on a much larger scale than Japan ever achieved. Incremental improvements work best when there are lots of them.

Second, this is happening in an era where consumers are much quicker to identify and communicate when a product is not exactly what they would like.

But third, China may be able to pay for speed. In addition to observing kaizen in action firsthand in Japanese manufacturing operations, Chinese companies, according to recruitment agents in Tokyo, have found that they can attract Japanese engineers specializing in semiconductors, railways and robotics as consultants. This is nothing new, the agents say, but it is now accelerating significantly.

Japanese corporations tend to retire highly skilled employees relatively early, who have not been paid particularly well during the deflationary years and have failed to create the sense of loyalty they might have hoped for. Such an engineer may be well paid by a Chinese company, and without directly revealing industrial secrets, his value remains immense: kaizen is essentially a process of trial and error, and an experienced engineer can offer invaluable advice on what has been tried and what has not worked.

Bosses don’t care about your Ivy League degree anymore

Callum Borchers

It’s hard to get a job at Charlie Gipple’s financial advisory firm if you went to the wrong college—like Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

The chief executive of CG Financial Group in Johnston, Iowa, says academic credentials don’t impress him like they used to. He worked with many graduates of top-tier colleges in previous jobs at MetLife and ING Groep, where he was a vice president, and says they too often approach clients’ challenges like textbook case studies, rather than real-world problems.

“If I were hiring somebody to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person,” says Gipple, who graduated from the University of Northern Iowa and manages a network of about 500 advisers.

Traditionally a springboard to the top of the résumé pile, a degree from a prestigious university can now prompt questions about its value or even work against job seekers.

In extreme cases, it’s disqualifying. A group of 13 federal judges signed a letter in May saying they will not hire law clerks who enrolled at Columbia Law School this fall because of how the school has handled campus protests. A spokeswoman for the university referred me to a statement issued when the letter was publicized, which says the school’s graduates “are consistently sought out by leading employers in the private and public sectors, including the judiciary.”

More often, people who studied at Ivies and similarly elite schools like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago say they’re used to snide remarks about their alma maters being woke or elitist.

That skepticism has intensified in the last year after a landmark Supreme Court case exposed inner workings of elite-college admissions and upended affirmative action. Evidence presented in the case revealed, among other things, that 43% of accepted white applicants at Harvard were recruited athletes or children of alumni, donors, faculty or staff.

Bryan Mark Rigg, president of Rigg Wealth Management in Dallas, says his Ivy League degree used to command universal respect from clients and colleagues.

“Going to Yale has opened up doors left and right,” he says.

He says he now gets mixed responses when people learn where he went to college. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campus have gone too far, in his view. And while Rigg, who is Jewish, says he never caught a whiff of antisemitism as a student, he considers anti-Jewish bias a big problem at top universities, citing campus protests against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

“Some people will say to me ‘Would you ever send your kid to an Ivy? They’ve lost their way,’ ” says Rigg, 53. “I have to agree with them.”

America’s changing perception of elite universities was evident on the campaign trail. President-elect Donald Trump, who holds an Ivy League degree himself from the University of Pennsylvania, chose as his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who has bashed selective colleges, despite having graduated from Yale Law School.

Looking elsewhere for talent

Karen Berman grew up in a working-class family, lost her father in high school, then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at Penn. She says her Ivy pedigree represents perseverance.

The nonprofit consultant has grown concerned about whether students at her old stomping grounds are developing critical-thinking skills on campuses that consistently land near the bottom of free-speech rankings. An internal Harvard report last month found roughly half of professors and students are afraid to express their views on controversial issues.

Berman says she feels the loss of open dialogue and civil debate takes some of the shine off her credentials.

“What should I do—take it off my résumé?” she asked when I pressed about what it feels like to be an alum and a critic of these institutions. It was a rhetorical question because, truth be told, the advantages of brand-name diplomas generally outweigh the drawbacks.

For proof, look no further than the booming market for college admissions help, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Even sharp Ivy League critics, like hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, acknowledge the value of alumni networks, and blue-chip banks and consulting firms continue to prize graduates of what their recruiters call target schools.

Bain & Co. still recruits from “the usual suspects” but the share of new hires who come from those schools is shrinking, says Keith Bevans, the firm’s head of consultant recruiting.

That’s partly because those few dozen schools don’t produce enough high-quality graduates to keep up with Bain’s head count needs. And, he adds, the firm has started conducting Zoom interviews where the interviewer doesn’t know the job candidate’s university affiliation.

“You’re purely judged on the merits of how you did in the interview, not my preconceived notions of how many people I should expect to like on a certain campus,” Bevans says.

McKinsey & Co. uses a problem-solving game to weed out job candidates whose skills don’t live up to their credentials, and to identify talented people that might have been overlooked in the past. The firm’s latest crop of business analysts includes graduates of tiny Grinnell College in Iowa and Santa Clara University, which admits almost half of applicants.

Broadened recruiting is partly a response to the way some elite universities have de-emphasized grades and SAT scores, says Blair Ciesil, a partner who co-leads recruiting at McKinsey. Grade inflation makes a sparkling GPA at a prestigious college less meaningful, she says. (For instance, about 80% of the grades awarded to Yale undergrads in recent years have been an A or A minus, according to a university report.) With a lot of top colleges no longer requiring applicants to submit standardized-test scores, McKinsey is sometimes missing a data point that historically informed hiring decisions.

I told Ciesil that the McKinsey game, called “Solve,” sounds like a contemporary version of the chalkboard that reveals a surprise genius in “Good Will Hunting,” a movie in which the janitor is more gifted than the students at MIT.

“I’m stealing that analogy,” she said. “Wouldn’t we be lucky to find our Matt Damon through the test?”

New York real estate attorney Adam Leitman Bailey doesn’t bother with games. He simply refuses to hire recent Ivy League grads, mostly because he thinks a lot of them get by on connections instead of talent and grit.

He notes that some top law schools, including Harvard and Yale, don’t rank students or give letter grades. Bailey, who got his law degree at Syracuse University, says he prefers to hire associates who rose to the top of less-glamorous schools because he believes competition prepares them for legal battles.

“It’s wonderful that we have these incredible institutions like Harvard and Yale, who produce presidents and leaders and big thinkers,” he says. “But that’s not what I do for a living, and it’s not the type of lawyer I need.”

Clara Pretus, neurologist: ‘There are evil agents who are profiting by generating this nervousness’

 

The neuroscientist studies how people fall into extremism and how the brain processes misinformation in polarized situations

Few people know the minds of extremists like the neuroscientist Clara Pretus, 36, because she has literally looked inside them. In her most celebrated work, the researchers scanned the brains of young people who wanted to participate in violent jihadist acts to understand the personal and social mechanisms that activated this interest.

In a more recent work, her team studied the grey matter of voters of Spain’s far-right Vox party to understand why they spread lies on issues important to them, such as immigration. The research revealed that when these topics were discussed, regions of the participants’ social brain were activated. “These are not the usual decision-making areas but those that help infer the thoughts of others,” explains Pretus from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In other words, they share false information with the group’s approval and cohesion in mind.

Pretus — who is an advisor to the United Nations Office on Terrorism and director of the Social Brain Lab — warns that a tragedy like the flash flooding in the Spanish region of Valencia create fertile ground for disinformation to spread. “When you are in danger, it is better for you to believe any information that can save you or that can help you,” she says.

However, she also criticizes the way certain political actors exploit such crises for their own advantage. Pretus notes that in times of anxiety and danger, opportunists often use emotionally charged language to “hack our nervous system.” “We must take this into account, because there will be more and more emergencies of this type, very conducive to disinformation and political gain,” says Pretus.

Question. The very night of the floods in Valencia, when people realized that the situation was very serious, the political blame-game started.

Answer. We are not used to something like this, it creates uncertainty, alarm and a sense of emergency, and it makes us rely on the little that we know. And the biases that we have already incorporated, whether consciously or unconsciously, come to the surface more intensely. For example, our social identity or political identity, the beliefs of a certain party and that vision of the world: who are the enemies, who are the allies... You rely on that in moments of uncertainty. And so we are going to be biased when we look for information, how we process it and it even affects how we perceive it. A person, whether on the left or the right, looks at the points of information that most confirm their pre-existing beliefs. There is an experiment on climate change where they show the temperature curve of the last centuries to liberals and conservatives in the United States. They follow their gaze and see that the liberals look at the last decades, they focus their attention where the most dramatic rise in temperature occurs. On the other hand, the conservatives do not pay particular attention to this last part of the graph. Even if we read the same news, we focus on the parts that confirm our worldview.

Q. Identity predisposes us to consume misinformation.

A. What we tend to do is look for things that reaffirm us as members of the group, trying to safeguard those things that put it in a good position. This is one of the proposals made to explain why we consume disinformation: to reaffirm our sense of belonging, not only on an abstract level, but also with our immediate environment, such as the audience we have on social networks. We are motivated to share information that we know our audience will receive well and that will serve to reaffirm us. And this is more important the more critical the information is. For example, in an emergency or when it is key to the group’s identity.

Q. Do we spread a hoax because we turn off our critical spirit, because it is a hoax that proves us right?

A. There are different reasons. Some are more cognitive: I don’t have time to pay attention or I don’t have the ability to look at this information critically and fact-check it. Then there is an educational aspect: a layer of protection is needed that education provides, to see the specific techniques used to spread disinformation, such as the use of false experts, negative emotions, and so on. And finally, there is the more partisan motivation, which also plays a role. Strategies have been developed that work for the average citizen with the most cognitive and most pedagogical approach, with some success. In reality, most disinformation is shared by a minimal percentage of internet users. It is a small but radicalized group that puts out most of the disinformation we consume. The problem is that for them, none of these strategies are effective because their motivations are different.

Q. Because it is deliberate.

A. It may be 100% deliberate, it may be in bad faith. And it may be a bit fanatical: the individuals may be very blinded by an ideology and when they see this information, their blood boils and they have to share it.

Q. In that sense, how do you see fact-checking strategies, combating each hoax, when there is a large machinery behind them producing them?

A. At the moment, fact-checking strategies have very limited effectiveness. They may reduce the spread by a very small percentage. There are initiatives and tools, but they are by no means sufficient. We have seen this in the case of the flooding in Spain and I think there will be many changes in this regard. Above all, because the spread of misinformation must have legal consequences. Because if not, we will not be able to create a healthy information environment, where people can exercise their right to make decisions based on truthful information.

Q. Should laws be passed against hoaxes?

A. Yes, because it can’t be acceptable that there are no consequences. But that is a very slow system to stop misinformation. To make it faster, we are experimenting with another approach: crowdsourcing, that is, open collaboration between users. It is an emerging idea, but we think it could be a faster system: that users can verify information on social networks.

Q. But studies show that when someone wants to correct us, it’s important that it’s someone in your group, someone you trust. It’s crucial to have people with enough courage and intellectual honesty to call people out within their group.

A. This is important, but it cannot be forced. It is difficult to influence what happens within a group. There is a study in the U.S. that shows that verification of comments coming from the opposite side not only does not work, but it makes the other side angrier and even more in agreement with the initial comment. When it comes from within the group itself, it is much more reliable, much more effective, but it is difficult. Ideally, there should be a social norm that says it is desirable to be critical of one’s own group. There should be an almost a moral value, which would be above our partisan interests, which is honesty.

Q. We can also award more importance to other types of entities. In these polarized times, we are broken down into a single identity: politics. But we have more identities, we share more things, we are parents, we are Barça fans... Can we generate trust in another identity area to resolve this?

A. It is a strategy that is being used with regard to climate change. Many Republicans in the United States are very skeptical, but when their identity as parents is appealed to, they are more open to improving the future conditions of their children. If I ask you about climate change, appealing first to your identity as a parent, you answer me differently. It is valuable to know that we have multiple identities and that we can appeal to them to be closer to the truth of the information.

Q. Was there a polarizing breeding ground that crystallized in the pandemic and has now become exacerbated again?

A. Yes, even before that, I think that Trump’s arrival reinforced impunity in the face of lies and misinformation. And then there have been a series of hard blows that have made people more desperate, more uncertain. And the media that we follow, the leaders that we listen to, have a super-important role. We recently did an experiment in the U.S., where we paid people to stop following hyper-partisan accounts for a month, both Democrats and Republicans. And we saw that there was a reduction in people’s political attitudes. There was less animosity towards the political opponent, towards the opposing group. And they were also exposed to less misinformation. In other words, our information diet has an impact on maintaining this state of inflammatory nervousness. Or reducing it if we disconnect from these sources. It is not just disasters like the pandemic or the flash floods, but there are actually agents of evil who are profiting and making a lot of money, investing a lot of money, in generating this nervousness and desperation.

Q. We follow these types of hyper-polarized accounts because they give us satisfaction. Should we all make a personal effort to reduce that type of exposure?

A. Absolutely, but there is always a problem with individual responsibility. First, because it is impossible. That is to say, if you are already reflecting on this, it is because you may not need it. And second, obviously structural changes at the political level, in terms of European regulation, are much more effective. There is always a tendency to shift responsibility to the individual. But people are working 10 hours a day, they have time limitations, they have to scrutinize information while trying to get through their day. They have a responsibility, but the change has to be more structural, more profound. And we cannot leave citizens alone in the face of misinformation.

Q. Speaking of loneliness, does social isolation and loneliness, which is reinforced on social media, play a role?

A. Yes, absolutely. It’s because we work remotely, we don’t go out, we don’t meet other people... And meeting up with people is a dose of reality. Some people say that working is good because it forces you to be compatible with reality. Because when we’re alone we start to go online and you end up in corners of the internet without even knowing how you got there. Many times, when you share it with someone, when you externalize it, it sounds ridiculous to you while you’re telling it. It’s very, very important to have social interaction and this has been proven by many studies. Loneliness has many drawbacks, it reduces life expectancy, and one of the drawbacks is that if you lock yourself in your own mind and on top of that you have access to the internet, it takes you to increasingly radicalized places, towards more extreme content. It’s very good to be in contact with people in real life.

Q. But it is increasingly difficult to find those points of friction, since we surround ourselves with like-minded people.

A. Yes, and extreme situations like Spain’s flooding make you polarized in your personal life too. You stop seeing certain people. For example, Brexit caused a restructuring of friendships. It has an impact on your personal relationships, but at the same time it is in personal relationships where it is easier to express different identities. Interaction in three dimensions provides the opportunity to connect on other levels. It is much more nuanced, there are interdependencies, you have emotional ties.

Q. The solution is to connect more in three dimensions.

A. In four dimensions, because time is also there.

Q. And how will the wild episode of disinformation we are experiencing affect us in the future? Will it generate problems of social cohesion?

A. Erosion of the fabric of social cohesion, yes, 100%. And also a crisis of confidence in institutions, clearly. People keep repeating: “We are in a failed state.” People are incorporating this type of information, and trust in these democratic institutions that are here to, in principle, safeguard our peaceful coexistence is deteriorating further. The great threat of polarization is violence: if we lose the notion of a shared reality and anything goes, any narrative is valid, this favors the justification of violence. It is easier to justify the use of violence because this reality does not exist, and I don’t even mean an objective one, but an intersubjective one, in which we are all in agreement. And it is easier for these stories of victimization to proliferate, which is the formula for success to justify violence. But it is not a new phenomenon. George Orwell said that he had seen dead people who had not been spoken about, and read about battles that had not taken place. This is typical of conflict situations: distorting reality to justify the violence that some individuals want to use to advance their political agenda.

Q. When you talk about playing the victim, are you referring to conspiracies about replacing white people and theories of that sort?

A. Victimization is the star tool for justifying violence. And it is used. But there are stories of victimization that are true and others that are exaggerated or false. For example, women have traditionally been subordinated to men. It’s true. Now there are men who say they are being victimized by feminism. And when you expose these narrative structures of “they are oppressing us,” it is easier and more justifiable to fight against that oppression.

Q. Is this deliberate exercise of disinformation to undermine all confidence in official sources caused because when you don’t believe anyone, you can believe anything?

A. Of course, everyone is discredited, delegitimized, as a source of information. It is a very good strategy to make a change of power. If we have a status quo, institutions that have been in place for decades, it is the best way to blow up what is there.