Give And Take

My guest is Michael Patrick Lynch. His newest book is Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture (https://www.amazon.com/Know-All-Society-Arrogance-Political/dp/1631493612). Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet―where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them―has contributed to the rampant spread of “intellectual arrogance.” In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us. Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell and imposing them on a cybernetic future they could not have possibly even imagined, Lynch delves deeply into three core ideas that explain how we’ve gotten to the way we are: • our