Show Notes
Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage, good and evil. Their conversation focuses on the tension between compassion and truth: how to take injustice seriously without reducing people to identity categories, what happens when clinicians bring activism into the therapy room, why biological reality has become politically charged, and whether "wokeness" is beginning to lose its hold on public life. Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, on faculty in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, USA, and on faculty and a Supervising Analyst at the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship including 5 Gradiva Awards, he is the author and/or editor of over 35 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies including most recently End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate. In 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association.
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Can fighting racism end up reinforcing it? Shelby Steele grew up under segregation and became a Black militant in the 1960s.
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If we could explain everything happening in your brain, would there still be something left to explain about you? Physicist Avshalom Elitzur thinks so—and argues that accounting for consciousness may require changing the laws of physics. In this lively conversation, Michael Shermer challenges Elitzur on why subjective experience should be anything more than a product of the brain, whether an AI could be conscious, and what a hypothetical human without consciousness would have to say about any of this. Avshalom Elitzur is an Affiliate Professor at the Institute for Quantum Studies, Chapman University, and a senior researcher at Iyar, the Israel Institute for Advanced Research. He works in the foundations of quantum mechanics and is best known for the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-testing problem.
Would World War II have happened without Hitler? Would someone else have built Apple without Steve Jobs? Jared Diamond joins Michael Shermer to ask how much history depends on particular people. From Darwin's discoveries to the rise of Christianity, Diamond considers when someone is truly irreplaceable, when someone else would have done much the same thing, and how we can tell the difference. Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of Time magazine's best non-fiction books of all time, Collapse, a No. 1 international bestseller, and The World Until Yesterday, among other books. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others. His new book is Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?