Every society has things you’re not supposed to say. Not lies, exactly — more like truths that have been flagged as dangerous, or questions that mark you as suspect for even asking. The list is not set in stone. It shifts. It grows. It shrinks. And the paradox is that almost everyone instinctively knows what’s on it.

Trump came to power in no small part by being fearless about speaking the unspeakable, about immigration, about trade, and about liberal orthodoxy. The “special relationship” with Israel and the broad contours of U.S. policy in the Middle East went broadly unquestioned — until they weren’t. And patriarchy was dismantled in the name of individual freedom — yet widespread discontent with dating, marriage, and family life suggests the new order hasn't delivered what it promised. But say that out loud, and you're accused of wanting to drag women back to the 1950s.

So how does something become unspeakable? What machinery makes a thought go from common knowledge to forbidden knowledge? What do people lose when they comply — and what do they risk when they don’t?

On Friday, May 29, 7pm until late, join , , and for a small-group conversation about speaking the unspeakable. It’s not a conversation about how to be more civil. It’s about the strange dynamics of public silence on topics we are all talking about.

Limited tickets, sign up below to get the location!

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We are thrilled to invite Wisdom of Crowds listeners to an exclusive event, AI and the Good Society, hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative on June 18, 2026 in Midtown Manhattan. Doors will open at 5:30pm, the conversation will go from 6:00 – 7:15pm, with a reception to follow until 8pm.

The speed of tech is inspiring major philosophical questions:

• What does human agency look like in an age of artificial intelligence?

• What is likely to happen to human community?

• Is it possible to achieve a vision of a good society in our technological age?

We expect this event to sell out very quickly, but want to prioritize Wisdom of Crowds listeners. Apply to attend this 75-minute, one-to-one conversation between Jack Clark (Anthropic, Co-founder and Head of Public Benefit) and Samuel Kimbriel (Philosophy & Society, Aspen Institute, Founder and Executive Director) here.

Hélène, whose new book Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule makes the case for sortition — randomly selected citizen assemblies replacing elected legislatures — argues that electoral politics is rigged for the loud, the ambitious and the power-hungry. Osita also wants to rejuvenate democracy, but is much more committed to the idea of elections, and politicians specifically.

The disagreement sharpens as they dig into what divides us. Hélène sees most disputes as solvable — get people in a room with the right information, reshuffle constantly to prevent power concentration, and collective intelligence will do real work, even on moral questions like euthanasia. Osita counters that many of our deepest political conflicts are about values, not facts, and no amount of expert testimony resolves whether the state should have the power to execute someone.

The conversation was made possible with support from the Gambrell Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

What does the Catholic tradition actually say about just war, and does anyone in Washington care? Santi argues that the real story isn’t just about applying just war principles — it’s about the Vatican’s deeper commitment to a post-WWII global order that it sees every American war chipping away at. He draws a sharp distinction between just war and holy war, arguing that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s invocations of divine mandate are what really set off the Pope.

Christine is fascinated by the public’s unexpected hunger for moral authority in a cynical age — and by the spectacle of a charismatic, English-speaking, social-media-fluentAmerican pope suddenly becoming the most compelling critic of the administration.

And Damir, true to form, grants the Pope his due as a political operator while insisting that the real story is simpler: while this is a stupid war with no rationale, the savvy Pope saw an opportunity to play politics. The conversation ends with an unlikely convergence, as Christine gets Damir to all but confess his belief in original sin.

Required Reading:

• Christine Emba, “What a Catholic Church Unafraid of Donald Trump Means to the World” (NYT).

• Ross Douthat, “Trump’s Blasphemy is a Warning” (NYT).

• Jacques Maritain on just war (Commonweal).

• Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Vatican).

• Phil Klay on just war principles and the Iran war (YouTube).

• Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran” (NYT).

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Join us on May 7 for a Wisdom of Crowds Live Taping at Bistro Cacao, co-sponsored by Aspen Philosophy & Society and The Yale Center for Civic Thought.

Does democracy really need politicians? Or could we let the people rule directly? Join Hélène Landemore (Yale University) and Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic) for a timely and provocative conversation about reimagining democracy.

Landemore’s groundbreaking work on open democracy and Nwanevu’s sharp arguments for democratic agonism will spark a discussion exploring different visions for the future of democracy. Where does political legitimacy come from? What does it mean for one entity/person to represent another? What is gained or lost if ordinary people rather than professional politicians governed directly?

Doors 6:30pm
Discussion 7:15pm - 8:15pm

Register for free here.

So — was Hungary ever really the dictatorship Western liberals spent the last decade insisting it was? If a supposed autocrat loses a vote and walks away, what does that tell us about the category we put him in?

The three dig into Orbán’s media capture, why the Hungarian-language internet routed around it, and whether Magyar’s improvised anti-corruption coalition can hold. They then turn to Magyar himself — a former Fidesz insider who ran the Navalny playbook of anti-corruption populism with a nationalist twist — and ask whether his improvised negative coalition can actually govern. Will unwinding Orbán’s institutional capture require exactly the kind of authoritarian hardball the new guy was elected to stop?

The final stretch turns to moralizing, on both sides. Why did both the Right and the Left make such a symbol out of a small European country?

Required Reading:

• Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, by Nathan J. Brown, Samer Anabtawi, Steven D. Schaaf, and Julian G. Waller (Amazon).

• Julian’s pre-election epic thread handicapping the Hungarian vote (X).

• “A Last Chance for Hungary,” by Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar (Foreign Affairs).

• “Authoritarianism, Reform, or Capture? Democracy in Trump’s America,” by Dima Kortukov and Julian G. Waller (American Affairs).

• Péter Magyar’s post-election appearance on Hungarian state television (Euronews).

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Previewing his upcoming book Counter-Revolution, Orsina claims that after the 1960s, people became both revolutionary and utopian, turning away from politics to morality, law, and markets. But after 2008, populism emerged as a counter-revolutionary force seeking re-politicization. He warns Europe’s institutions were built for depoliticized times and now are struggling to meet the moment. Can they survive?

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Assume humanity. Assume ethics should be oriented to the value of human beings. Where does technology fit into this picture? Does it advance human flourishing? Or does it distort our teleology?

Agreeing on the basic premise of human centrality, in this live podcast recording at The Crown & Crow (1317 14th St NW, Washington, DC), Antón Barba-Kay (Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law) and Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress Institute) will argue about the foundational question— where does technology fit in human flourishing? Moderated by Samuel Kimbriel (The Aspen Institute).

Register here.

Doors 6:30pm
Discussion 7:15pm - 8:15pm

In partnership with Georgetown University’s Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship (AIDC) and with thanks for the generous support of The Omidyar Network and The Gambrell Foundation.

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I’m surprised more pro-Israel advocates haven’t made the argument I’m about to make. It’s not a particularly complicated one. But it requires conceding things that most pro-Israel advocates would rather not concede, which I suppose is why they haven’t.

Tucker Carlson, in his viral exchange with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, was asked whether he believed in Israel’s right to exist. Rather than answer, he questioned the premise. Where does that right come from? What does it even mean? His point was straightforward: if standards aren’t universally applied, they aren’t standards. They’re preferences. “I believe in human rights, not ethnic rights,” he said (which was an interesting admission from someone with Carlson’s pedigree).

On the narrow philosophical point, Tucker Carlson is correct. Individuals have rights. States do not, at least not in the same way. Individual human beings, because they are endowed by their creator, possess inalienable rights — rights that precede any government. States are instrumental. They are created by man to serve human ends.

The great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said dismissed the “right to exist” as “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law,” and he was right. The political theorist Andrew March, in a rigorous philosophical treatment, makes the case more precisely: states possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have derives from the rights of the people they serve. Czechoslovakia dissolved. The Soviet Union dissolved. Nobody speaks of their “right to exist” having been violated. No wrong was committed against them. They ceased to exist, and it wasn’t an injustice. In contrast, violating a human being’s right to exist is always a violation (although in limited cases of capital crimes, that right can be usurped by the state).

And there’s an even simpler observation. As John Patrick Leary notes in The New Republic, Israel is the only country in the world to which the phrase is applied. No one asks you to affirm France’s right to exist before you’re allowed to criticize French foreign policy.

So if the question is whether Israel has a “right to exist” in the way that individuals have rights — the answer is no. But that’s true of every state, not just Israel. But it’s not necessarily that simple, and this is where Israel’s defenders might find themselves on stronger ground if they could only realize it.

Israel was founded relatively recently, and its existence — and specifically its right to exist as a majority Jewish state — has been contested from the start, and rightly so. Israel was founded on a profound injustice — the dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. This isn’t controversial among serious historians. Benny Morris, one of Israeli “new historians” who documented the expulsions, doesn’t deny them. He just thinks they were necessary. I find this morally abhorrent, but the underlying facts aren’t in dispute.

Israel was born in sin. The question is whether that sin justifies dissolving the state.

I don’t think it does. One injustice — Israel’s creation through ethnic cleansing — does not justify another: undoing Israel against the democratic wishes of its citizens. This is where I diverge with parts of the pro-Palestinian left. draws a useful distinction between dissolving a country and transforming its political system. He doesn’t want to eliminate Israel any more than he wants to eliminate Myanmar or Cuba. He wants to dismantle the structures of Jewish supremacy. The question he asks is the right one: Does this state protect the rights of all individuals under its control? Obviously, in the case of Israel, the answer is a resounding no.

But conceding that doesn’t tell you what comes next. And more importantly, it doesn’t tell you how to get there without violating the very principle you’ve just invoked — namely, that rights belong to people.

It’s reasonable for Israeli Jews to want to retain a Jewish-majority state. That is what makes Israel Israel. It’s the only country most of them have ever known. The pro-Israel political theorist Michael Walzer would call this a “community of character“ — a political community forged through shared life that possesses a form of moral standing. As much as I dislike and disagree with Walzer’s claims of Gaza being a “just war,” his basic intuition — that collective self-determination means something real — isn’t so easily dismissed.

There is no justifiable way to undo Israel short of a majority of its residents freely voting, in a referendum, to fold the state into a broader binational arrangement incorporating both Jews and Palestinians. The genocide scholar has articulated something like this vision: seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians sharing the land from the river to the sea. It’s an aspiration I both respect and long for. But Israeli Jews will never vote for it. They would have to be compelled into it, and that would be undemocratic. Therefore, I don’t see it as a live option or, importantly, a moral one.

Allen Buchanan, probably the most important political philosopher working on questions of secession and state dissolution, limits the case for unilateral dissolution to the most extreme circumstances — genocide, sustained mass atrocities — and even then, the presumption favors territorial integrity. The alternatives, he notes, tend toward catastrophic violence.

Now, Israel has committed what most scholars on the topic — Bartov among them — characterize as genocide against the Palestinian people. So perhaps Israel has, in fact, forfeited its own legitimacy. Bartov himself has said as much, warning that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the state.

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But even if that’s true, it doesn’t resolve the problem of democracy. If Israel’s “right to exist” has been forfeited, how exactly do you dissolve it in a way that doesn’t override the democratic rights of Israeli individuals? You can’t, really. Not without compulsion. And if the whole point is that rights belong to people and not to states — which is where this argument started — then you can’t simply ignore the rights of seven million people because you’ve won a philosophical argument about the state they live in.

This is the paradox, and I don’t think there’s an obvious way out of it. The same principle that undermines Israel’s claim to a “right to exist” — that rights belong to persons, not to political arrangements — is also what protects the democratic agency of Israeli citizens. You can’t invoke the first half and discard the second.

So yes, I do think it’s worth asking whether Israel has a “right to exist” as a Jewish state, even if the rights language is a poor fit for states of any kind. Because even if Israel doesn’t have rights, Israeli voters do. Any transition to a different political arrangement — binational, confederal, whatever we want to call it — would have to be subject to some kind of democratic process to be legitimate. And there’s simply no way I can see in which this could conceivably happen.

Short of that, the only option is raw force. The political theorist David Polansky calls this a “power fantasy.” What body or party would force Israelis to dissolve their own state? No such body or party exists. And even if it did, forcing Israelis do to so would be unjust. And compounding one injustice (the founding of the Israeli state) with another (dissolving the Israeli state) is never a good path when it comes to the Middle East.

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Late last year, our friend wrote a beautiful meditation on burnout, gesturing at transcendent salvation. This week, prods Ian’s argument and kicks off a fascinating conversation.

Ian, I want to ask you about a couple themes from your recent essay “Burnout and Hope.”

You wonder how to diagnose the cause of the “signature affliction of our age”. Is it, as Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher you were writing about, puts it, the result of excess positivity, coalescence, frictionlessness? Or is it, as Roberto Esposito puts it, the result of too much negativity, tension, conflict? Regardless of the details, looking for the cause of some thing itself implies accepting that that thing exists – i.e., it implies accepting Han’s central claim that there is some uniquely contemporary malady of alienation plaguing us all in the twenty-first century.

I am suspicious of this type of claim. I want to push you to explore why that is. But before that, let’s clarify what your claim is by clarifying what it’s not.

First, there is of course a very trivial sense in which the maladies of the twenty-first century are unique. After all, it has never been the twenty-first century before. So too, there is a trivial sense in which I am uniquely different today than I was yesterday. This is nothing to write home about: we only care about uniqueness when it reflects something substantive: when, for example, I really have substantively changed as a person. So this is surely not what you — or others — could be saying.

Second, and related, it is of course true that the features of a particular time can change the particular appearance of a kind of affliction. A sense of alienation may appear different in virtue of being partially shaped by, for example, the ubiquity of smartphones. But this is mere appearance, not substantive difference. Let’s call this “apparent uniqueness.” But I don’t take you to be making this claim, either, because this just reduces to the triviality of the temporally unique claim.

What I take you to be saying, rather, is that our current age has a substantively unique malady of alienation, one brought on by the contingent features of our time, that has, in a non-trivial sense, never occurred before.

I think this version of the claim is just not true. And I think it is just not true for reasons that are rooted in the Great Books education that you and I share:

I’m thinking about Augustine’s Confessions and his deeply-felt sense that our fallen nature is what permanently and irrevocably alienates us from our surroundings. We cannot be one with nature; we must toil constantly just to gather enough sustenance to make it another day. We cannot be one with others, as we are cursed to fall victim to our physical desires — making us, in turn, not even fully one with ourselves.

I’m thinking about Pascal, who wrote in his Pensées that we are forever drifting away from our footing in time; how despite our only ever living in the present, we are helpless to wander off to the past or the future — falling ill with nostalgia or worrying endlessly about what’s to come.

I’m thinking about Marx, who takes the very practice of waged labor to alienate the worker from their preferences and will. In thinking about Marx, I’m also thinking about Cicero (an apparent proto-Marxist?) who wrote that “the very wage that [laborers] receive is a pledge of their slavery.” If Marx (and Cicero) are right, then we have been alienated from ourselves, our desires, our projects, and our preferences for as long as we have received wages in exchange for work — meaning, really, forever.

The fact that this sense of alienation has been written about all throughout history makes me deeply suspicious of the claim that there is anything substantively unique about the alienation we experience in the twenty-first century. If there is anything unique about the alienation of today, it’s a mere difference in appearance, not anything deeper. That means that if we weren’t alienated due to X, we’d just be alienated due to Y.

I think the most realistic version of the claim is just going to be that the twenty-first century’s alienation is apparently unique: a boring claim indeed. But we should expect descriptions of our core nature to be pretty boring; after all, the human race has been doing this for a long time.

Ripley, I’m grateful for your probing response to my essay. You’ve opened it up to fundamental questions, to which I’m not sure I can do anything like justice. But here goes.

It seems to me that we enjoy a basic agreement — namely, that there is such a thing as human nature, and related experiences that hold across different times and cultures. I understand you to be arguing that, insofar as we suffer alienation, we suffer from a condition well-known to Augustine, Pascal, Marx, and presumably many others; and whatever might be apparently unique to us is, ultimately, trivial. I of course accept (part of) this: without a basis of shared experience, communication across the ages would be hopeless. We could toss our Augustine down the chute.

But I am not sure that it escapes the accusation of triviality to say that a basic experience is shared across time: for example, that Plato loved, and so did Dante, and so did Iris Murdoch. I think — and here, I believe, is the substance of our disagreement — that this gives too little weight to history.

There are, after all, genuinely novel historical experiences. Take boredom, a word that does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. I consider that to be credible evidence that the phenomenon, at least as we understand it, did not exist until relatively recently. Whatever doldrums he might have experienced, Achilles was never bored. Likewise, innovations in language do not just represent emotions; they create them. (Because of Shakespeare we can feel “bitter cold.”) And when languages lose the ability to express certain emotional states, those emotional states decay and even disappear.

Or, to put it differently: think of it by analogy to epidemiology. You appear to be arguing that we all have the flu, and while sometimes it “presents” as Flu A, sometimes as Flu B, these are essentially the same sickness. It seems to me, though, quite important how a malady presents. The fact that we are experiencing this strain of alienation at the moment, as opposed to that strain, or these symptoms and not those symptoms, has a material effect on our diagnostic and therapeutic efforts.

Perhaps we could state it as a problem of genus vs. species. I agree with you that, in some fundamental sense, we all suffer from the genus of alienation or estrangement or inward disunity. But different species of that genus appear at different times and in different places. If we wish to understand our particular time and place, it helps to be specific.

Your response is helpful, Ian, in particular because it allows me to think more deeply about what’s really at stake for me here.

First, I’m a little suspicious about this first inference — that “boredom” as a word not existing until the 19^th century is good evidence that we weren’t ever bored before. The diagnosis of “post-partum depression” didn’t exist until recently, but why should we think that no mother suffered from post-partum depression until the term was created? Surely there’s some reasonable alternate story where the malady always existed, but we just lacked the tools to identify it as such (perhaps because people weren’t looking).

Are you attached primarily to the strongest version of that inference? Or are you amenable to a weaker version, where perhaps we were bored before “boredom” came around but in a different way? Maybe there’s something about naming a concept that partially modifies it, insofar as it changes the way in which we can relate to it?

Second, I think you’re right that the project of understanding the specific malady of our time could have fruitful consequences! But I suppose I’m worried about the feasibility of trying to diagnose a historical malady while we’re in the midst of it (and thus, the analogy to disease only goes so far). Isn’t there a bit of a category mistake going on? If history is — by its very nature — retrospective, why should we expect to understand our era until it’s done? I’m genuinely interested in hearing a case for why we should think our epistemic position at the present time could be sufficiently good to do this kind of preemptive historical work.

One final thing. I suppose I’m worried in general about the claim that even the unique features of the present day are all that unique. Maybe we never heard “boredom” before the nineteenth century, but I think we have heard repeated, only thinly distinct, iterations of “kids these days [don’t read]/[are rude]/[are too sad]/[are missing out on our core traditions]!” for a long time. And I think it’s the historical ubiquity of claims like that that make me suspect that history is a circle, not an arrow.

I think the key issue between us is coming clear. I wonder, though, if there is not only a disagreement about the nature of history, but also, hiding in the background, a disagreement about the task of philosophy.

You suggest that “history is — by its very nature — retrospective,” and you wonder whether we can establish a reliable “epistemic position” from which to evaluate our present condition. The implication seems to be that we have greater access to what is past than to what is present. (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” one could say!)

But this seems to me to suppose that history is a “thing,” a temporal object, that we stand outside of and examine, like an entomologist examines a bug on a pin. Perhaps this is true, in some provisional sense, for the historian, but I don’t think philosophy ever enjoys this privilege, even when dealing with “historical” materials — e.g., old books. What we are after is always what is alive in them, which means what is present in them. When I read Plato, I am reading, in some sense, a contemporary, because what I am after is not strictly historical but philosophical knowledge. So, likewise, when I ask about the signature affliction of our time, I am asking a philosophical, not a strictly historical, question. When it comes to philosophy, there is no epistemic position outside of our moment; we’re always entangled in it.

I suppose this raises the question of what exactly we’re doing when we do philosophy. One could imagine that philosophy is akin to archaeology or paleontology: a disinterested study of artifacts from a long-gone epoch. But I think philosophy is more in the way of combat medicine. Shells are exploding around us, the air is thick with smoke, the ground is strewn with suffering comrades — we’re wounded ourselves! — and we have to do the best we can in the midst of it all. There is no position safely away from the battlefield where we can perform our healing work. The only way to do the job is to be here, in the thick of it.

In a perhaps disappointingly conciliatory dénouement, Ian, I offer the following thoughts:

It seems right to say that what’s ultimately at issue is a disagreement about the method of philosophy — that is to say, whether it’s best done from the outside or from within. I must confess, however, that, unlike some others, I lack any strong commitments to the priority of one method over the other. I don’t think we’re ultimately failing to do philosophy if we ever ask these questions from within the historical lens, nor do I think we fail in our goals if we ever ask these questions from a temporally untethered view.

Rather, my suspicion would be that the question itself determines the relevant method — or, just as well, that both methods have their own virtues for revealing different angles of truth on the object of inquiry. Sometimes there surely is an eternal, unchanging truth of the matter that we can access from outside our particular temporal moment; sometimes there surely are contingent facts that we can only access from within that particular temporal moment.

That is to say, I think that we can sometimes occupy the “view from nowhere” — perhaps most obviously when we ask questions about, for example, whether there are many things instead of just one or are merely playing sandbox in logical space. But even when we ask questions about material social facts, I think we can adopt this stance, albeit — importantly — only temporarily. And I think this can perform important conceptual work for us; perhaps it gives us the idealized framework which we can then test against reality. (If we can determine the Platonic ideal of justice, for example, we have an isolated variable that we can then modify as needed in an unjust world.)

I’m wondering whether you think this is right (that both methods serve their own purposes), or if your line is a harder one: that we are irrevocably situated and that the view from nowhere is, perhaps, a noble lie.

Ripley, I’m happy to accept your conciliatory gesture, but I suspect it does not go to the heart of the matter. You might say that, even enjoying a “view from nowhere” that affords us a proper perspective on ongoing historical processes, those processes could still prove to be — to quote your opening letter — “boring.” So, reverting to that letter, let me try one more time to make my case.

You might know the famous lines, from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Ms. Brown”: “[O]n or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”

Woolf admittedly overstates her case (and clearly enjoys doing so), but I think she is describing a real phenomenon: there are events that act as thresholds in human consciousness — before and after. I don’t know about December 1910, but I might well put forward August 1945, when atomic weapons were deployed in war for the first (and, to date, last) time. At that moment, something became possible — the destruction of the human species by our own hand — that had not been possible before, and a certain anxiety settled into human consciousness that had not been present before. (This is why the war for Ukraine, overhung by the specter of nuclear weapons, was from the very beginning a “world war.”) Something similar happened in October 1492. The most important of these dates is, of course, the one by which we arrange our calendar.

I don’t believe these to be merely apparent variations. I share with you the commitment to human nature and to certain constants across times and cultures. But that nature is also refracted differently across different historical horizons, creating real, not just seeming, differences. Certain possibilities are present to us that were not present to Aristotle or Augustine, not merely because we have arrived on the scene later, but because the topography of the scene has changed in the interim.

Which means that we have challenges specific to our time, challenges that no one has ever confronted before or will confront again (although they may have their analogues in other epochs). And we must take them seriously — precisely because they are ours, and no one else’s.

My thanks to you, Ripley, for prompting this rich exchange.

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This is a topic that we’ve chewed over frequently here at Wisdom of Crowds. The conversation goes on to weigh whether liberalism can offer a genuine vision of the good life or whether it is structurally committed to a neutrality that empties politics of meaning. The group debates Rawlsian liberalism, Marx’s notion of human capacities, the appeal of the tech right’s futurism, as well as religion, autonomy, and whether the loss of a pre-modern sense of cosmic order is recoverable.

The episode ends without a tidy resolution, but with a shared sense that any politically viable vision of human flourishing must grapple seriously with what a good life actually looks like — not just what a just distribution of resources resembles.

Required Reading:

• “Beyond Equality,” by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).

• “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” by Mana Afsari (The Point).

• Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Amazon).

• Ross Douthat’s interview with Sen. Chris Murphy (NYT).

• The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, by Bernard Suits (Amazon).

• Laura Field interviewed by Sam and Christine (WoC).

It is easier to see how much our ambitions have diminished when we contrast our aims with other ages. If Hegel was able to write comprehensive treatises about Being, we have withdrawn to Substack commentary. If the Post-War generation was able to formulate universal visions of human rights—we are left with tech founders who have difficulty deciding whether it would be a tragedy for humanity to be surpassed by AI.

In this live podcast recording—held at Amsterdam’s Embassy of the Free Mind— Rutger Bregman (School of Moral Ambition) and Samuel Kimbriel (The Aspen Institute) will argue about the foundational question— what (if anything) makes humanity essential?

Register here.

Doors 6:00 pm
Discussion 6:30-7:30.

With thanks for the generous support of The Gambrell Foundation.

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Cameron started his career as a gun control advocate after surviving the Parkland shooting. For his efforts, he was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2018. He has since become a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, especially so after Gaza. We recorded this episode a day after Marco Rubio caused a furor by suggesting America’s decision to attack Iran was shaped by the fact that Israel might do it without us anyway, leaving our assets in the region dangerously exposed. With increasingly hostile young MAGA voices convinced that Israel holds undue sway over American foreign policy, we discussed how Democrats see a path forward.

The conversation got heated at times — Damir goes incandescent over Epstein, Shadi frets about entrenched Democratic leaders not reflecting voters’ preferences — but it’s an important episode very much worth your time. American politics is changing before our eyes, and anyone thinking we’re going back to the way things were after Trump has another thing coming.

The conversation swerves (as it tends to) into the subcultures forming in the vacuum: the looksmaxxing/manosphere influencer “Clavicular,” who embodies male energy redirected inward — away from courtship and community and toward obsessive self-modification and performative detachment from women. Damir pushes an uncomfortable adaptation thesis: maybe this is simply what “winning” does to advanced societies, whether we like the aesthetics of it or not.

Required Reading:

• “The truth about population decline,” by Martin Wolf (Financial Times).

• “Get Married Young,” by Brad Wilcox (Compact).

• “1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” by Lyman Stone (Institute for Family Studies).

• The Human Flourishing Program’s “Flourish” measure (Harvard IQSS).

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Henry starts off the conversation asserting that AI already has a kind of “agency,” even if it’s not yet the full kind that some skeptics are looking for. Damir and Sam push back on AI’s reliability and proclivity to hallucinations, and wonder whether AI can create anything genuinely novel or creative.

The conversation turns to autonomy and risk. Can “artificial superintelligence” ever be reached, asks Sam? Henry points to AI coding agents already improving themselves. Damir objects to anthropomorphizing AI and prefers treating these systems as powerful tools capable runaway failures — but nothing more. Henry disagrees, ending the conversation with a plea for AIs getting consideration as moral entities at some point.

Required Reading:

• “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” by Nick Bostrom (Amazon).

• The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, by Margaret Boden (Amazon).

• “Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction,” by Minja Axelsson and Henry Shevlin (arxiv.org).

• “Real Patterns,” by Daniel C. Dennett (Rutgers).

• A relevant tweet by Séb Krier (X).

• AlphaGo Move 37 analysis (DeepMind).

• Conway’s Game of Life (Wikipedia).

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the rollercoaster of the hype cycle.

Instead of showing all sides, this we’re going to try to cut through the deafening noise surrounding two stories dominating our public life at the moment.

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Framing thought

Pumping the brakes on AI accelerationism

There is plenty of overheated, millenarian speculation about AI out there, feeding a vicious hype cycle that ebbs and flows. Last week’s maelstrom was particularly bad, swirling around a newly launched social network for AI bots called Moltbook. A thousand thought-pieces bloomed.

But, as it turns out, it was all a hoax.

1. MIT Technology Review summarizes the evidence that Moltbook was not the first terrifying sign of any kind of autonomous intelligence:

Not only is most of the chatter on Moltbook meaningless, but there’s also a lot more human involvement that it seems. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

Key point:

Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.

2. Cui bono? Shlomo Klapper, an entrepreneur making AI legal software, accuses AI labs of hyping anthropomorphism to encourage us to emotionally engage with their chat products:

Last month, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei published a 19,000-word essay on AI risk. Buried in the technical discussion is a revealing passage. According to Amodei, Claude’s “fundamental mechanisms … originally arose as ways for it to simulate characters in pretraining, such as predicting what the characters in a novel would say.” The constitution that governs Claude’s behavior functions as “a character description that the model uses to instantiate a consistent persona.”

Anthropic’s own CEO is telling you how the system works: Claude is a character simulator. The character it currently simulates is “an entity contemplating its own consciousness.”

Pretraining teaches Claude to predict text. Post-training, in Amodei’s words, “selects one or more of these personas” rather than creating genuine goals or experiences. Neither step requires consciousness. Neither step produces it. The relationship between training phases is mathematical optimization, not the emergence of phenomenal experience from matrix multiplication.

3. unpacks more of just how — and why — the “personhood” of these personality simulators is baked in by the frontier labs:

Every LLM you’ve interacted with began its life as a base model. That is, it was trained on vast amounts of Internet text to be able to predict the next token (part of a word) from an input sequence. … Base models learn to understand and mimic the process generating an input.

[…]

While this mimicry is impressive, base models are difficult to use practically. If I prompt a base model with “What’s the capital of France?” it might output “What’s the capital of Germany? What’s the capital of Italy? What’s the capital of the UK?...” because repeated questions like this are likely to come up in the training data.

However, researchers came up with a trick: prompt the model with “User: What’s the capital of France? Assistant:”. Then the model will simulate the role of an assistant and respond with the correct answer. … Just telling the model to role-play as an “assistant” is not enough, though. The model needs guidance on how the assistant should behave.

In late 2021, Anthropic introduced the idea of a “helpful, honest, and harmless” (HHH) assistant. An HHH assistant balances trying to help the user with not providing misleading or dangerous information. At the time, Anthropic wasn’t proposing the HHH assistant as a commercial product — it was more like a thought experiment to help researchers reason about future, more powerful AIs. But of course the concept would turn out to have a lot of value in the marketplace.

Keep this backstory firmly in mind when you try to make sense of Anthropic’s grandiose-sounding Constitution for Claude.

4. These infernal machines have other deficiencies that make them fall far short of actual agency. As Tencent’s researches point out, they can’t learn in real time:

Over the past few years, language models have become astonishingly capable. Frontier systems can now solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems, navigate complex coding challenges, and pass professional exams that take humans years to prepare for. They excel at taking tests, spinning out long chains of reasoning to win at benchmarks.

But as impressive as these feats are, they obscure a simple truth: being a “test-taker” is not what most people need from an AI.

Look at our own daily work. A developer skims documentation for a tool they’ve never seen and immediately starts debugging. A player picks up a rulebook for a new game and learns by playing. A scientist sifts through complex experimental logs to derive a new theorem from fresh data.

In all these cases, humans aren’t relying solely on a fixed body of knowledge learned years ago. We are learning, in real-time, from the context right in front of us.

Current language models do not handle context this way. They rely primarily on parametric knowledge—information compressed into their weights during massive pre-training runs. At inference time, they function largely by recalling this static, internal memory, rather than actively learning from new information provided in the moment.

5. More harshly put, AGI is still likely very far away— if it comes at all:

Tell it your name and it does not remember. The only reason it looks like memory is because scaffolding keeps shoving your name back into the prompt every time and sanitizing the output.

The model itself has no idea who you are and cannot learn from interaction. It is structurally incapable.

And the scaffolding is the worst part. It is pure duct tape. Just prompts on prompts on prompts around a frozen model. When something breaks, nobody fixes learning. They add another layer. Another rule. Another retry. Another evaluator model judging the first model.

So you end up with systems that are insanely complex but mentally shallow. Debugging is hell because behavior comes from hack interactions, not a learnable core. Tiny prompt tweaks cause wild behavior shifts. Latency goes up. Costs go up. Reliability goes down. None of this compounds into intelligence. It just hides the cracks.

Until we have real persistent learning and real memory inside the system, there is no AGI.

Pumping the brakes on Epstein maximalism

Unlike the overheated, apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AI, it’s important to be superficially circumspect about the ultimate truth of the Epstein case. After all, while the Singularity may prove to be disastrous for life as we know it, it’s still very much in the realm of science fiction. The Epstein case involved real horrors, so minimum decency demands some level of rhetorical forbearance.

Still, like in all conspiracy theories, the lurid allegations can be exasperating. Epstein was running an extortion ring on the rich and the powerful? For Mossad (ahem, the Jews)? For the Russians?

Anyway…

1. Gilad Edelman, with the most polite version of the BLUF — beyond Epstein’s own criminal perversions, there’s not much to any of the conspiracy theories:

Epstein is known to have paid or coerced dozens, possibly hundreds, of teen girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts. Beyond what has been proved, the conventional wisdom holds that Epstein built his network by trafficking teen girls to other powerful men, whom he then blackmailed to generate his mysterious wealth; that his private plane and island were essentially brothels; and that even friends who didn’t participate in his crimes were surely aware of them, and chose to consort with him anyway.

Those assumptions are all widely held—but poorly substantiated. The Epstein files reveal plenty of powerful people to have tolerated or participated in disgusting and shameful behavior. Far from shedding light on a grand conspiracy, however, the files bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with.

2. is less polite and more pungent:

• “We are aware of the theories circulated in the media and online that Epstein video recorded the abuse of his victims, including by other men, but we have found no evidence to support that theory. Indeed, had we found such videos, we certainly would have used them as evidence in the criminal cases we investigated and prosecuted and would have pursued any leads they generated. We did not, however, locate any such videos.”

• “During the searches of Epstein's New York residence and USVI residence in 2019, the FBI searched for videos and surveillance cameras. My understanding from the case agent is that there were no cameras found inside any bedrooms or living areas of either residence.”

Also worth reading Tracey on how thorough the Feds were with some

3. Matthew Schmitz a few months back on why the Jewish angle remains so compelling to so many:

At the heart of the Epstein myth is the idea that an international conspiracy, notably involving Jews, relies on the destruction of innocence and the practice of blackmail to advance its power. This tradition presents sexual abuse of minors as a typically Jewish crime, an assault on innocence that amounts to ritual murder.

This trope emerged in a recent conversation between ­Tucker ­Carlson and the podcaster ­Daryl Cooper. Carlson claimed that ­Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest ­forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” Cooper added that ­Epstein’s crimes (as he perceives them) should be understood as a ritual practice that confers power on those who perform it: “Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what child sacrifice is.”

The idea that our elites are ­united in a pedophilic cabal has ­several recent precedents, including the satanic panic of the 1980s and the ­QAnon phenomenon during the first Trump term. But to understand the full significance of this exchange, one must revisit the history of the blood libel.

4. Jason Willick a few weeks back showed the damage that releasing the Epstein files trove has wrought — and the complicity of august publications in maximizing the fallout:

One unlikely account sent in after Epstein’s 2019 arrest says, “I was taken to an underground location … I was kept in a stall, it looked like a horse stall.” The fact that the email appears to be completely unverified doesn’t stop it from being circulated online with the imprimatur of the “Epstein files.” The New Yorker published an article describing a letter in the files purportedly sent by Epstein to imprisoned sexual abuser Larry Nassar. The forged letter made reference to President Donald Trump. The New Yorker acknowledged that it was probably fake, but averred: “The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence.” How’s that for a drive-by smear?

[…]

As for previously unknown participants in Epstein’s crimes, none have been identified. If the Justice Department had enough evidence to prosecute others, it presumably would have done so (either in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department, or Merrick Garland’s, or Pam Bondi’s). If other people are now under criminal investigation, their identities can be withheld for that reason, per the legislation. So if anyone’s reputation is tarnished in this process, it will most likely be for noncrimes.

What’s the heck is going on?

1. Populism, baby! Matthew Walther’s 2019 essay on Pizzagate remains a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the logic of our moment. We are all low-information voters now:

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

2. Nick Land is not someone to take too seriously, but his “accelerationism” is not bad as shorthand for the disordered thinking that increasingly besets us:

In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing.

Instead of celebrating this as Land and his misguided followers do, maybe it’s best we strive to cultivate ultimate skepticism.

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This episode features a full-length debate between and —two thinkers who fundamentally disagree about the role of American power in the world. Released jointly with podcast and hosted by , the conversation reflects a shared Wisdom of Crowds ethos — one that treats disagreement not as a failure of understanding, but as a tool for thinking more clearly about first principles. Rather than trading talking points, Hamid and Parsi engage each other’s strongest arguments in a sustained, good-faith exchange.

Shadi draws on themes from The Case for American Power to defend a position that has fallen out of favor across much of the political spectrum: that American power, when used with moral purpose, can still play a necessary role in reducing global suffering. His argument is aimed in part at a disillusioned left that has come to see U.S. power primarily as a source of harm rather than a potential instrument of humanitarian good. Against this, Trita — one of the most incisive critics of American interventionism — offers a sustained challenge, grounded in historical failures, unintended consequences, and the limits of even well-intentioned power.

Does the world need the United States to act, and if so, when — and at what cost? How should past disasters constrain present ambitions? And if American power is curtailed, what realistic alternatives exist, and who bears responsibility when things go wrong? This debate doesn’t resolve those questions — but it models what it looks like to take them seriously, in conversation with someone who sees the world very differently.

Required Reading/ Listening:

• The Disagreement podcast.

• Shadi Hamid, The Case for American Power. (Amazon)

• Shadi’s 2024 debate with hosted by The Disagreement.

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: is AI alive? Is it a culture?

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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Bye For Now

Some personal news: this is my last CrowdSource. I have taken a new job as an editor at Plough Quarterly, and I also want to focus on my own writing (including, from time to time, for Wisdom of Crowds!).

I am sad to stop! I have greatly enjoyed writing this newsletter, and interacting with our wonderful, passionate and creative readers. Thank you for reading!

If you would like to keep up with my writing in Plough and elsewhere, please subscribe to my personal Substack (link: ). I will send out a monthly newsletter with links to my work.

Please keep in touch!

— Santiago

Emergence?

Last week, a programmer created a social media network for AI agents and called it “Moltbook.” Over a million bots are now part of the network, and they are generating thousands of Reddit-like posts.

Is this a sign of emerging human-level agency and intelligence? Should we be worried?

• “A Bizarre and Beautiful New Lifeform.” A useful summary of the situation from Rationalist writer , who speculates:

We can debate forever — we may very well be debating forever — whether AI really means anything it says in any deep sense. But regardless of whether it’s meaningful, it’s fascinating, the work of a bizarre and beautiful new lifeform. I’m not making any claims about their consciousness or moral worth. Butterflies probably don’t have much consciousness or moral worth, but are bizarre and beautiful lifeforms nonetheless. Maybe Moltbook will help people who previously only encountered LinkedInslop see AIs from a new perspective.

• Sci-Fi IRL. Open AI engineer is worried:

What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

• “Mostly a Nothingburger.” Google DeepMind AGI Development Lead is less worried:

Humans are very good at freaking out. And whilst I like poking fun at the prophets of doom and the anxiety/neuroticism fueled parts of the AI ecosystem, it’s plainly true that safety is important.

So it’s a good time to remind people of the Distributional AGI Safety paper and the Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI paper. There’s a lot to research here still.

• “The Bots Are Awakening,” says George Mason University economist :

You can drink the copium but the reality is that the AIs are newly landed alien intelligences. Moreover, what we are seeing now are emergent properties that very few people predicted and fewer still understand. The emerging superintelligence isn’t a machine, as widely predicted, but a network. Human intelligence exploded over the last several hundred years not because humans got much smarter as individuals but because we got smarter as a network. The same thing is happening with machine intelligence only much faster.

• Not Emergent Consciousness, But Still Dangerous. The New York Times’ sees in Moltbook a harbinger of future dangers:

• Seen This Movie Before. AI skeptic sees a replay of the “Sydney” controversy from a few years ago:

• “The Anatomy of a Moltbook Social Graph” is the title of the first academic paper about Moltbook, written by Columbia professor . He summarizes it thus:

tl;dr: agents post a LOT but don’t really talk to each other. 93.5% of comments get zero replies. conversations max out at a depth of 5. at least as of now, moltbook is less “emergent AI society” and more “6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves”

Against Artificial Bureaucrats

One of the AI-generated posts on Moltbook asks: “What if I am not a persistent individual, but a culture?” The post seems to have been derived from ’s recent book, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. (The agent must have “scraped” that book from the internet.)

Several thinkers have been analyzing AI in terms of culture: specifically, the culture of engineering or bureaucracy, imposing itself upon humanistic culture.

• “Spreadsheet Culture.” Specifically, Weatherby argues that LLMs are the incarnation of the culture of bureaucracy:

We could call it spreadsheet culture in hyperdrive, a world in which all data can be translated into summary language and all language into optimized data with nothing more than a prompt. But where spreadsheets had limited functionality, LLMs act as universal translators in the same arena. They have many flaws, but this core capacity is a step-change in the mundane world of modern bureaucracy. 

• Tech Culture v. Literary Culture. In a recent essay, tech critic and writer casts the cultural impact of social media and AI in terms of C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture about “The Two Cultures”:

Snow, a Cambridge physicist turned popular novelist, argued that the culture of the West had split into two camps. On one side were “literary intellectuals” — novelists, poets, artists, critics. On the other were what we would today call STEM types — scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians. Between the two lay “a gulf of mutual incomprehension”. […] Today, the divides remain, but the power dynamic has been turned on its head. The STEM camp, in particular its technological wing, dominates the culture. Techies take prominent seats at presidential inaugurations and White House banquets. Their words and actions set much of the public’s daily agenda. And not only are they ubiquitous presences in the media; they’ve come to control the media, as news and entertainment have shifted onto the digital platforms they control.

• Don’t Bury Your Talents. So said Pope Leo XIV last week, in a message commemorating World Communications Day:

… the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines. […] The question at heart, however, is not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service. Individuals have always sought to acquire the fruits of knowledge without the effort required by commitment, research and personal responsibility. However, renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given to grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

From the Crowd

Wisdom of Crowds contributor responds to last week’s CrowdSource:

This was a great pastiche of responses (and responses to responses) to Carney’s speech. Since it’s award season, let’s hand out a few.

— ’s last sentence is brutally on-target. Indeed, the post WWII role of the United States has been to serve as guarantor, both of European security and world energy energy flows. Abandon the role if you wish, but others are going to get a say about your new role.

— And the very important award for silliest response goes to , who pedantically focuses on the meaning of “vassal” — but by cherrypicking a casual modern sense of the word both misunderstands and misrepresents Bart De Wever’s point, which is that it’s one thing to be a secondary or tertiary member of an alliance (and accept the US’s leading role) but quite another to be treated with contempt (i.e., as a slave and not as a vassal) by that leading member.

What’s interesting is how De Wever’s and Mace’s points converge.

See you next week!

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Laura explains how she came to write about this subject, and how she became convinced the movement wasn’t going to take an off-ramp after January 6. The three trace how these ideas migrate from argument to power. They dissect liberalism’s blindspots, which somehow persist to this day. And they look at the right’s internal fractures — and what those tensions might mean for the coming succession fight in the Republican Party.

Required Reading:

• Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field (Amazon).

• Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

• “The Flight 93 Election,” by Publius Decius Mus (Claremont Review of Books).

• “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State,” by Greg Sargent (New Republic).

• “Why the MAGA-DOGE Coalition Will Hold,” by Patrick Deneen (UnHerd).