Trump is in one where he’s trained his audience not really to care about his consistency or his honesty. And some of these echo chambers are vast. “There are people who have assembled their audiences in such a way based on how they operate in public where they’re in an echo chamber,” says Sam. I find that really frustrating, because there’s not a comment thread on Earth at this moment dealing with anything I’ve written or said which isn’t riddled with people confidently deriding me for views that I don’t hold.”īecause there’s no remedy for this phenomenon, Sam has learned over time to just dial down his own frustration with it and carry on - though it’s especially difficult in the current age of social media, memes, Internet trolls, and a political climate that caters more to sensationalism than truth.
“Or just frank misunderstandings of what my views are. “The vast majority of the criticisms I get - certainly the most scathing ones - are based on, in many cases, deliberate misrepresentations of what I believe or what I’ve written or what I’ve said publicly,” says Sam. But when you’re Sam Harris, author of books like Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue, Lying, and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, sometimes you just want people to understand what you’re trying to say without applying their own bias to the overall message. When you’re in a debate with someone about any issue, you don’t want to be slow to notice when you’ve made a mistake or an inconsistency in your argument makes itself apparent.
Does this make Sam Harris the Anti-Trump? Check out episode 514 of The Art of Charm to find out.ĭownload Episode Worksheet Here More About This Show He contrasts this approach with Donald Trump, whose carefully curated audience tends to accept whatever he says - even when what he says today contradicts what he said yesterday, or when clear evidence debunks his “facts” as fictions. He’s used to people disagreeing with him, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, he’s always willing to see things from the perspective of his audience and admit when he’s wrong. Asked what he does, author, philosopher, and neuroscientist Sam Harris says he thinks in public and tries to reason as honestly as possible about what many deem controversial issues - like religion (namely Islam) - even when the audience isn’t likely to be converted to his way of thinking.
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