Has Liberalism’s Very Success in Delivering Human Flourishing Doomed It? Steven Pinker and Derek Thompson Discuss at LibCon2025
It’s the only system that puts self-correction at the heart of its project and so can revitalize itself
We are pleased to share with you the full video and transcript of LibCon2025’s closing keynote conversation—including the Q&A section with the audience toward the end. It has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. We hope you find it illuminating.
Shikha Dalmia: This is the last but not the least event of this conference.
Our previous panel dealt with the postliberal right’s critique of liberalism, which thinks liberalism is finished, burnt out, exhausted. But what these critiques miss is liberalism’s own capacity for self-criticism, self-correction, and, above all, self-rejuvenation—contrary to the brittle and breakable alternatives they are offering.
Liberalism means different things to different people in different times. It means one thing in Europe and another in America. In Europe, American conservatives were considered liberal because they believed in a lowercase “r” republicanism and opposed monarchies. In the U.S., liberalism has been used in a classical sense as a belief in constitutionalism and a commitment to individual rights and a separation of powers. But it has also been understood as a progressivism to distinguish it from traditionalism and conservatism.
One reason liberalism has so many different senses and meanings is that it is an ever-changing, ever-evolving idea. But at any given time, many conceptions of liberalism can coexist and challenge each other.
I am saying all this because our two distinguished fireside chat partners come from different liberal traditions.
is a progressive who has been writing a lot about if and when progressive governance went wrong and how to set it right. He is the co-author, with , of the #1 New York Times bestselling book Abundance. He also the author of the Derek Thompson newsletter, the host of the Plain English podcast, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. is an experimental psychologist at Harvard, and defies easy characterization. He is, in a sense, a really, really old-fashioned liberal who believes in reason, science, and humanism. Imagine that? He has done seminal work showing how by tapping into the better angels of human nature, the Enlightenment has resulted in massive reductions in violence and delivered stability vital to improving the human condition. From this vantage point, he has criticized progressives, conservatives, and, most recently, heterodox thinkers as well. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” His latest book is When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows …Derek and Steve will offer a critique of various shades of contemporary liberalism, including their own, and discuss what a renewed and revitalized liberalism would look like.
Without further ado, I’ll hand the floor over to them for our final act.
Derek Thompson: Steve, I have a very bold, very broad question to begin with: What exactly are we defending here? What is the liberalism that you identify with? To ask this in a more punchy way: What kind of a liberal are you and what kind of a liberal aren’t you?
Steven Pinker: A friend of mine who sat next to me prior to the session said, “Well, I’ve enjoyed the last day and a half. We’ve heard a lot about the threats to liberalism and a number of definitions about what liberalism is not, but I haven’t heard a whole lot about what liberalism is or why we should defend it.” I’m glad that we’re going to have the opportunity to try to do that in this session.
So, I identify liberalism as a product of the Enlightenment, which I characterize as the idea that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing, and that if we try to do it we can gradually succeed. That makes me a progressive in the sense that I believe in progress, although it differentiates me from a lot of capital-P progressives who I find hate the idea that we’ve made progress because it would seem to vindicate a lot of things that they oppose like neoliberalism and markets; I find that some of the the biggest pushback to the idea that we’ve made progress comes from self-identified progressives, paradoxically enough.
But I don’t think I’m alone—the idea that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing, and that we can and have succeeded in doing so, which is my summary of the ideals of the Enlightenment, was echoed in Barack Obama’s noteworthy statement that if you could pick a time to be born and you didn’t know who you would be—which body you’d be born into, etc.—you would pick now. He made that comment in [2016], and I think it’s probably still true [nearly] 10 years later. That would be a second pithy way of characterizing what liberalism is and why we ought to defend it.
“I identify liberalism as a product of the Enlightenment, which I characterize as the idea that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing, and that if we try to do it we can gradually succeed. That makes me a progressive in the sense that I believe in progress. … We can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing, and that we can and have succeeded in doing so, which is my summary of the ideals of the Enlightenment.” — Steven Pinker
You probably couldn’t do a whole lot better than the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson wrote—and I’ll update for modern sensibilities—all people are created equal and are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to secure these rights governments and other institutions are implemented, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That’s, I think, not a bad statement of liberalism—although it has been claimed, as we just heard in the previous panel, by some of the anti-liberal movements who try to restore what they think of as the original conception of the Constitution and the Declaration. But that’s [the Declaration’s] idea of equality, that all people are created equal, of freedom or liberty, of human flourishing, that everyone has the right to pursue life and happiness, of government and other institutions as constructive forces to allow people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, and the idea that governments themselves can only be justified by their ability to allow people to flourish, to pursue those aims, and that they themselves must be kept in check by the consent of the governed.
I’ll add another. I’m not enough of a soundbite engineer to suggest what the slogan for liberalism ought to be, but I’ll throw out a number of ideas that I think can capture it and maybe people can adopt for the occasion whichever one seems most appropriate. Going back to the time of the Framers, James Madison’s little couplet, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, no constraints on government would be necessary” ... that’s also not a bad summary of what animates liberalism. We have government and other institutions because we’re not angels.
I would actually connect this to contemporary research from cognitive psychology and behavioral economics of the many cognitive flaws and fallacies and biases and errors that the human mind is susceptible to. I think that the Founders had an intuitive idea of it, as did the Greeks, but we now have good scientific evidence that people are indeed not angels. But if we form institutions where we can make up for each other’s blind spots, even though we’re very poor at noticing our own fallacies—we’re somewhat better at pointing out the other guy’s fallacies … if we have deliberative forums in which there is freedom of speech, then we have some hope of making progress, of approaching the truth.
I’ll throw one last little motto or slogan from someone who I think the two of us both admire, the physicist David Deutsch, who said: “Problems are inevitable. Problems are solvable. Solutions create new problems, which must be solved in their turn.” Deutsch himself was strongly influenced by Karl Popper, another great liberal theoretician who called for an experimenting society that just as scientific propositions ought to be falsifiable to count as scientific, and that the activity of science consists of seeing which of our beliefs withstand attempts to falsify them, that principles of governance, of social organization, should be constantly evaluated in terms of how well they work, and that we should be prepared to learn to add to our institutions, to revise our institutions. That’s what makes liberalism different from classical conservatism, which by default would tend to conserve institutions—which is not a bad idea, because there can be rational reasons to think twice about abolishing long-standing institutions that seem to have kept us in good order. But we should nonetheless be prepared to be mistaken. Not only do circumstances change, partly because of changes in technology, but because no one can deduce the perfectly running society from the armchair, from first principles, we should constantly assess how well things are going and take measures to revisit the institutions that seem to be flawed and be prepared to constantly update them.
Those are the principles that I think characterize liberalism and that are very much worth defending. And, again, I would defend them by data. Just as Obama implicitly alluded to, if you do try to assess how well we’ve been doing, there are plenty of problems, but we’re better than we used to be, so we have been doing something right. Let’s try to keep doing that, but let’s also try not to repeat our mistakes—let’s learn from our mistakes.
Thompson: There’s a meme going around on Twitter, that bastion of liberal humanism, right now that says: “In order to have a conversation with me”—I believe this is a man tweeting—“you have to be conversant in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.” It’s sort of like the mandatory bookshelf that one must be familiar with in order to talk to this particular anonymous tweeter. I wonder if we can do that experiment for Pinker-esque liberalism. What is the mandatory bookshelf going from, let’s say, Locke to Popper and Deutsch that would make people even more intimately familiar with the strain of liberalism with which you identify? Who’s on the Liberal Pinker Bookshelf?
Pinker: Well, certainly Thomas Hobbes. He identified the conditions that call for a social contract in a state of nature, in a state of anarchy. A war of all against all is hyperbolic, but there is a lot of violence in anarchy and not necessarily because we are inherently bloodthirsty or that we have genes for violence but simply because without assurance of your own security there’s always a temptation to launch a preemptive strike against your neighbors, if only out of fear that they might launch a preemptive strike against you, out of fear that you might launch a preemptive strike against them—ad infinitum. That’s the Hobbesian trap or dilemma. It actually doesn’t even depend on the idea that we’re innately sadistic or bloodthirsty—just that that is inherent to the condition of anarchy. By submitting to a social contract in which we surrender some of our liberty in order to protect our own liberty against the depredations of others, we can all be better off. That is, it’s a solution to a social dilemma to public goods problems to externalities.
So, Hobbes. Certainly, John Locke and Montesquieu and David Hume. John Stuart Mill, for sure, for the best and still relevant defense of free speech, alluding to the fact that none of us is infallible or omniscient, and kind of anticipating the cognitive judgment and decision-making literature, the Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky findings on human limitations that we’re fallible and don’t realize it—we all think we’re infallible but we can’t all be—and therefore free speech is the only way that we can collectively hope to acquire knowledge. Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies. Spinoza—not that anyone should read the Ethics, which is a pretty dense and intimidating tome, but certainly if you’re going to at least look back to who we owe modernity to, my wife Rebecca Goldstein wrote a book called, Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, so I feel obligated to name-check Spinoza as a guy who gave us modernity. And, as a modern defense of these principles, I think David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity is important reading.
Thompson: Some of these that you named, that you consider liberal, they don’t always go together. You mentioned the use of knowledge to enhance flourishing, a value for equality, a moral democratic government that believes in a legal constitution. Sometimes these things go there and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you get a character like Fritz Haber, for example, who is a brilliant scientist who fixes ammonia for the first time and allows us to develop the agriculture of the planet to feed billions more people. But he ultimately becomes a Nazi, and even before he becomes a Nazi, in World War I he helps the German government develop chemical weapons to kill the French. Lots of brilliant Germans became Nazis who believe very fervently in science. Is your liberalism like a kind of BLT, where you need the bacon, the lettuce, and the tomato to be your kind of liberal, but there are some people who have to be just the b, just the l, just the t, and you need the whole combination to actually fit your definition?
Pinker: Good question. I have a few more words to add to my earlier characterization. I say that the ideal of the Enlightenment is that we can deploy knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing—so, as you say, knowledge can be used for any purpose, including to develop synthetic fertilizer and poison gas. Just as Hume pointed out—maybe something of an exaggeration—you can’t get an ought from an is. So it really depends on what your goals are. The goal of universal human flourishing as the ideal—the idea that there’s nothing special about me, just because I’m me and you’re not, that if you think deeply enough about it, if you reflect enough, you realize that the only sustainable belief system that we could share is one in which all people are equal and therefore our goal should be to grant to others that which we claim for ourselves—has to guide the application of knowledge.
Thompson: You have written so much about the facts of human progress, and the—in your opinion—underappreciated facts of human progress: longevity, our ability to solve diseases, declining childhood mortality, poverty, pollution, violent crime. Do you consider those material facts of human progress to be the receipt of liberalism, the proof that liberalism can work when applied at scale?
Pinker: Yes, more or less. I mean, I don’t want to define liberalism circularly, as everything that led to good stuff happening. But [one crucial] liberal institution is markets ... which, by some definitions of liberalism, especially in Europe, are almost equated with what in America we call “libertarianism” and what is sometimes pejoratively called “neoliberalism, that markets are the best way of generating prosperity, affluence, abundance—a topic that I assume we’ll return to later in the conversation.
[Another] is democracy—surveys of happiness show that, after affluence, the biggest contributor to life satisfaction is a sense of freedom. And we also know just from how people vote with their feet that they want to move to democracies, that democracy tends to correlate with many other good things in life like safety and education and health and longevity.
“Centrist liberals, a group that I often find myself aligned with, will react negatively when progressives or people on the left are seen to complain too much about modernity, to not fully appreciate the progress that has been made. What I find interesting about that is that I do think that, historically, it is the complainers who often help push progress forward.” — Derek Thompson
This came up this morning: the liberal international order, which is under such threat, does deserve credit for the reduction in war since the Second World War. It’s admittedly a roller coaster and one in which we are currently in the midst of an uptick because of Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza. But [while] it has wiped out a few decades of progress, we’re still much better off than we were in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, to say nothing of the two world wars. Now there are more realist theories of the so-called long peace—the decline of great power and interstate war—such as nuclear deterrence. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, I reproduce arguments that the nuclear deterrence doesn’t deserve all or even most of the credit, that the liberal international world order does deserve a lot of the credit for that.
Science, another handmaiden to the Enlightenment, if not a child of the Enlightenment, is what deserves the credit for the vast expansion of human longevity. As Steven Johnson put it in his book, Extra Life, we not only have extra life, we have an extra life, in the sense that, historically, life expectancy at birth was about 30 in most times and places, and now worldwide it is more than 70 and more than 80 in the affluent West.
So I think all of these good things can be attributed to Enlightenment institutions like science, democracy, and markets.
Thompson: An interesting tension that I want to push on is that sometimes centrist liberals, a group that I often find myself aligned with, will react negatively when progressives or people on the left are seen to complain too much about modernity, to not fully appreciate the progress that has been made. What I find interesting about that is I do think that, historically, it is the complainers who often help push progress forward. You mentioned longer lives. I’m not the biggest Ralph Nader fan in the world, but there’s no question that traffic fatalities are down 80-90% because we wear seat belts, and the reason that traffic and riding in a car is so much safer is in large part because Unsafe at Any Speed was published by Ralph Nader in the 1960s. It created this movement that made driving our cars safer. We have an eight-hour work week, we have much more humane working conditions, in large part because generations of extremely annoying complainers—Knights of Labor and many other groups from the anti-monopoly movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—fought for rights that now modern liberals consider utterly necessary, utterly humane, utterly sympathetic, to use your word.
“The activity of science consists of seeing which of our beliefs withstand attempts to falsify them, that principles of governance, of social organization, should be constantly evaluated in terms of how well they work, and that we should be prepared to learn to add to our institutions, to revise our institutions. That’s what makes liberalism different from classical conservatism, which by default would tend to conserve institutions—which is not a bad idea, because there can be rational reasons to think twice about abolishing long-standing institutions that seem to have kept us in good order. But we should nonetheless be prepared to be mistaken.” — Steven Pinker
How do you think about the relationship that we should have to modern progress, given on the one hand the fact that, yes, enormous gains have been made across all of these provable material fields, while at the same time recognizing that those gains are often downstream of complainers who sometimes reject the story of progress that a centrist liberal would like to tell?
Pinker: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. A lot of reforms, including longevity and things like implementing sewage systems, and pure food and drug acts that prevented people from dropping like flies from tainted milk, were advanced by critics, activists, rebels of their era. Traffic safety, if you look at the curve of fatalities per passenger model driven, it’s come pretty much continuously downward since cars were introduced; I think Nader did give it a push, but it is something that had been advocated in different forms at different times. This is not to deny— but in fact to endorse— the idea that a lot of progress has to be pushed by people who recognize problems and urge that we solve them, often in the face of complacency or entrenched interests.
So I think there’s an important zone that reformers have to aim for in between complacency and fatalism or cynicism or outright radicalism, namely, the system is so decadent and corrupt that we should just burn it down and anything that comes out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have today, which we saw in some revolutionary movements, perhaps most horrifically in Cambodia, but I think also in some of the MAGA right, who just want to demolish institutions in the mistaken belief that things have gotten so bad or so much worse than they used to be that we’ve got to level them and start over. So that zone between complacency and either fatalism (“there’s nothing we can do about it; let’s just enjoy ourselves while we while we can because we’re all going to go extinct in in 30 years”) or radicalism (“let’s burn everything down”) is the zone we ought to aim for. And, yes, activists and complainers make a difference.
Thompson: I want to talk about the relationship between liberalism and redistribution. In many of the early philosophers that you were talking about ... there was no notion of social security in John Stuart Mill. Thomas Jefferson was not writing about the need for Medicare and Medicaid. And yet when we think about what liberalism means in the 21st century, I think these ideas are at the core of most modern liberals’ self-identity.
So how do you think about this relationship between a multi-century tradition of liberalism and a much more recent invention of the redistributionalist state?
Pinker: Yeah, there isn’t much in the Enlightenment about social security or medical care, but in part because there was no medical care. It was bloodletting.
Thompson: Yeah, universal leeches was not exactly part of the original Declaration of Independence.
Pinker: Right. I think “redistribution” is an unfortunate word, even though it is the reality, because it seems to prioritize equality per se as the goal as opposed to lifting up the poor and having the people pay for it who can afford it the most, that is, progressive taxation and a safety net. So the redistribution is mathematically what’s happening but it’s not the goal—the goal is to prevent people from dying of inadequate medical care and food and so on. You may well get rich people to pay more than middle class people because they don’t notice the taxes. So I think that’s a case where it’s a combination of recognizing problems that were suddenly deemed to be solvable, which previously were probably thought to be intractable or acts of God—Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” and it occurred to someone that maybe that’s not true, maybe we can do something about poverty—together with the affluence that makes that, I don’t want to say a “luxury” to help the poor and the sick and the elderly, but there’s a sense in which it is. There’s a phenomenon called Wagner’s Law that says that as societies become more affluent, they redistribute more, so that you start to get pensions and social security in countries like Brazil and India as they start to get more affluent. I mean, it sounds kind of callous to call it a “luxury,” but there’s a sense in which affluent countries can do that more.
And they do it when people start to notice or care about Jean Valjean being sent to prison for stealing a crust of bread, or The Little Match Girl freezing to death, or burying Grandpa Joad by Route 66 on the way from Oklahoma to California. So the narratives start to impinge on people’s consciousness; the nuisance of artful dodgers and delinquent kids roaming the streets, or stories of elderly people having to survive by eating dog food start to weigh on people, and governments start to take on the responsibility of seeing to those who have nothing to contribute in a market economy for which they can be compensated. That’s just an inherent problem—not everyone has something productive to offer. The very poor, disabled, children, and the elderly don’t, and modern societies have figured that they should do something about it, and government is shown to be the best mechanism. And despite both the dreams of the anarcho-libertarian right and the almost paranoid fears of some of the left that the United States is already in, or is moving toward, a state with no social net, we’ve already got a lot of redistribution.
The OECD publishes a graph—which blew my mind—of the percentage of GDP that is redistributed toward the sick, the poor, the elderly, and children. What it shows is over the course of the 20th century, starting around the 1930s in the New Deal era, every OECD country shoots up from a few percentage points of GDP to about between 20-30% of GDP and all affluent nations fall in that band, including the U.S., which isn’t even the stingiest.
So it seems to be a fact of life that modern capitalist democracies all have a social safety net. Now, maybe they don’t need to; maybe we can envision some nonexistent utopia of affluence and democracy and no redistribution. It doesn’t exist, probably can’t exist, and probably shouldn’t exist. Within the overall framework with which we began the conversation, this wasn’t really a part of the original Enlightenment vision for successful societies. It might be a case of learning, of seeing, that if you only have markets, there are aspects of society that you want to fix, that you want to change.
Thompson: We were talking earlier about some of the enemies of liberal centrism on the right and on the left, and I want you to tell me if you think that this question is oversimplifying anything, but it seems to me that liberal centrism has identified enemies that they consider “left woke” versus “right woke.”
On the right, I look at MAGA and I look at Trump and I look at the number of extremely wealthy businessmen that support that political movement right now, and I think, “Aren’t you the winners of liberalism?” And then I look at the left and there’s all sorts of surveys that suggest that the most progressive, the most far-left college students, tend not to be lower class or middle class; they tend to be the children of affluent families. And so, in a way, they’re also the winners of liberalism. What do you make of the possibility, of the provocation, that liberalism has created conditions that have made illiberalism appealing to the winners of the system.
“It seems to me that liberal centrism has identified enemies that they consider ‘left woke’ versus ‘right woke.’ On the right, I look at MAGA and I look at Trump and I look at the number of extremely wealthy businessmen that support that political movement right now, and I think, ‘Aren’t you the winners of liberalism?’ And then I look at the left and there’s all sorts of surveys that suggest that the most progressive, the most far-left college students, tend not to be lower class or middle class; they tend to be the children of affluent families. And so, in a way, they’re also the winners of liberalism.” — Derek Thompson
Pinker: So, does it carry the seeds of its own destruction?
Thompson: “Does liberalism carry the seeds of its own destruction?” is a much more parsimonious way to ask that question, thank you.
Pinker: Yes or as Rob Henderson put it, at least in reference to the woke left, are these luxury beliefs, such as denigrating marriage and the police, that you can afford to have if you’re in the highly educated upper middle class but that actually lead to suffering among the lower middle class and lower class? And, conversely, on the right, these billionaires who benefit from public education, stable currency ...
Thompson: ... markets, financing, all these inventions of liberalism, yeah.
Pinker: Yeah, so that has happened. The question is, “Is it necessary?” “Is it inevitable?” I tend to think that most things aren’t inevitable, that with a different set of contingent events, and then perhaps a different intellectual ecosystem where some some of the arguments for the benefits of liberal institutions were articulated more clearly, maybe if we ran the timeline over, if we rewound the tape and ran it again, it may not have turned out exactly that way. So it may be a vulnerability, but I don’t know if it’s an inevitability.
Thompson: Well, let’s remove the question of, “Is it inevitable?” and replace it with the question of, “Why did it happen?” It happened—why do you think it happened?
Pinker: Yeah, it may be that, among the products of successful, affluent liberal democracies, there is the luxury to have these beliefs. But it may also ... I don’t know what set of events set this into motion, whether, for example, the Great Recession of 2008 led to a sudden dose of cynicism, leading to some illiberalism.
Thompson: Can I offer a theory and have you play around with it? I’m not even sure I believe this but it’s a story out there, so this is my best effort to represent it. Ronald Inglehart has these theories of material and post-material politics where he says that a country solves material problems and then, a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy, it rises up Maslow’s hierarchy and the most important questions to you are not, “Where is shelter coming from?” but rather, “Who am I?” These are questions of identity—post-material questions.
“There’s an important zone that reformers have to aim for in between complacency and fatalism or cynicism or outright radicalism, namely, the system is so decadent and corrupt that we should just burn it down and anything that comes out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have today, which we saw in some revolutionary movements, perhaps most horrifically in Cambodia, but I think also in some of the MAGA right, who just want to demolish institutions in the mistaken belief that things have gotten so bad or so much worse than they used to be that we’ve got to level them and start over.” — Steven Pinker
So, as a society gets richer, its politics become more post-material, more cultural than economic. And I wonder if it’s possible that liberalism doesn’t have a very good post-material message compared to its competitors in the marketplace. Right-wing nationalism is very good at saying, “there are good guys and there are bad guys, there are Americans and there are others.” You can imagine another kind of politics that says, “there’s the good and the bad, there’s the rich and the poor, there are the big companies and the small companies, that maybe are more successful at dividing the world in two, in a way that makes them more successful in the political marketplace, even if their solutions might not be as good for building long-term wealth.” So, another way of framing this is to say, or I guess the provocation back to you is something like, “Does liberalism have a branding problem, in an age where politics is cultural now, and is likely to be quite cultural going forward?”
Pinker: Yeah, I think it’s a good way of putting it—that the post-material transition in affluent societies does open up the question of, “What will give us meaning and purpose once the wolf is no longer at the door and we have a roof over our heads and we have food on the table? Now what ought to energize our political motives?” That gap can be filled with various dubious crusades and causes, and perhaps that is a challenge for liberalism, because that question can be answered. For one thing, we’re affluent, but if you care about humanity, whether you’re a humanist or a Christian, maybe eliminating poverty worldwide could be a super-ordinate goal once your own needs have been satisfied. It wasn’t so long ago that that would have been seen as romantic, idealistic, utopian—but now that extreme poverty is down to 8% of the world’s population, it used to be 80%. [As I mentioned earlier,] Jesus thought the poor will always be with you—could we prove even Jesus wrong?
Could we have world peace? Again, it’s almost a satire of what the airhead finalists for Miss America wish for. On the other hand, the fact that deaths in war been going down, the number of wars went down until the last few years, the idea of world peace, at least an end of interstate war, is not utopian, it’s not John and Yoko, It’s not Peter, Paul, and Mary. I think it is attainable. The fact that, as Deutsch pointed out, solutions create new problems, so the solution of extreme poverty, of early death, was partly solved by capturing a lot of energy from fossil fuels and that created an obvious new problem, namely, climate change. There is a lot of unfortunate fatalism about climate change, especially in younger generations who are sometimes convinced that we are actually going to go extinct by 2050 and that it is an unsolvable problem; the idea that new sources of abundant carbon-free energy might actually mitigate climate change and give us a relatively soft landing as a global solution.
All of these are things to aspire toward even if we’ve solved the problem of where our next meal is coming.
Thompson: I should be clear that I don’t necessarily subscribe to Inglehart, personally. I think that to a large extent we just had a cost-of-living election, an affordability election, in 2024. Lots of things happened in Texarkana, but one thing that happened is the price of everything went up in 2022 and 2023 and they blamed the incumbents. And no incumbent democracy in the entire world essentially fared better in the 2022 to 2024 period than they did in the previous era. So I think in many cases Inglehart’s theory—the idea that everything is just cultural—can be over-applied. I think a lot of Americans just voted based on price. That said, I do think that politics is becoming more cultural over time, if you look at it over a decade-by-decade basis.
And I do think liberalism has a problem here; I do think there is a bloodlessness to some of its best arguments. Like, I love David Deutsch, I loved Beginning of Infinity—one of the best ideas in that book is that progress is not the end of problems, it’s the replacement of one set of problems with a better set of problems. I love that idea—it’s probably the worst bumper sticker I could possibly imagine for a presidential candidate. “Vote for me. I will replace your problems with another set of problems.” ... with an asterisk there that says, “But that set of problems will have a better distribution of outcomes than the set of problems it is replacing.” Like, oh, my God, you cannot imagine something more bloodless to put on the back of an F-150.
Pinker: Can I just comment on that? The election was partly about economic issues: the price of eggs, the inflation of the preceding couple of years. But it was also on post-material and cultural issues, which Trump used to his advantage. In particular, the highly effective ad in which Kamala Harris said that the federal government should pay for transition surgery for illegal immigrants. The slogan, “She’s for they/them. We’re for you.” These are issues that affect a tiny percentage of the population that are not at all economic that have an enormous cultural resonance. So I think, not to disagree that inflation played a huge role, culture still looms large in people’s voting decisions.
Thompson: I think culture looms large—I agree with that.
“I do think liberalism has a problem here; I do think there is a bloodlessness to some of its best arguments. Like, I love David Deutsch, I loved Beginning of Infinity—one of the best ideas in that book is that progress is not the end of problems, it’s the replacement of one set of problems with a better set of problems. I love that idea—it’s probably the worst bumper sticker I could possibly imagine for a presidential candidate. ‘Vote for me. I will replace your problems with another set of problems.’ ... with an asterisk there that says, ‘But that set of problems will have a better distribution of outcomes than the set of problems it is replacing.’ Like, oh, my God, you cannot imagine something more bloodless to put on the back of an F-150.” — Derek Thompson
Your new book is When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows ... Is it a book about liberalism?
Pinker: Not exactly. Not really. Although it touches on a number of issues related to liberalism. Its U.S. subtitle is: Common Knowledge—“common knowledge” in the technical sense: the state in which everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, ad infinitum. So the title actually is: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows ..., and I had to fight for the dot dot dot. My editor said, “Oh, no. You can’t end the title with punctuation. It will screw up the indexing services.” But one of my blurbers, Nobel-prize winning mathematician Robert Aumann said, when he got the draft sent out by my editor [with a] full stop [instead of a dot dot dot], “You know, that’s not technically what common knowledge is.” I brandished that to get my ellipses back.
Thompson: I want to make sure that we at least put two of the biggest ideas from that book on the table, because they’re really interesting and I think they do intersect with this conversation. One is the concept of pluralistic ignorance and the other is called “spirals of silence.” So, what is pluralistic ignorance? What are spirals of silence?
Pinker: Pluralistic ignorance is a kind of common misconception, namely, everyone thinks that everyone else thinks something, but no one thinks it. The classic example in the literature was that, if you interview fraternity bros, everyone thinks that it’s stupid to drink until you puke and pass out, but they say, “What can I do? All the other brothers in the fraternity think it’s cool.” And it turns out no one thinks it’s cool, but everyone thinks that everyone else thinks it’s cool. There are a number of examples like that.
And spiral of silence comes from when there is actual punishment of some belief, where everyone falsifies their preferences and is afraid to speak out the truth out of fear of being punished and especially out of fear of not punishing those others who speak the truth. And so you can get a kind of madness of crowds and entrenched irrationality when people are punished for pointing out something that is true, sometimes out of fear of being punished if they don’t punish themselves.
Thompson: I think it is a book about liberalism. Here’s my pitch. Your first definition of liberalism, the “b” in your BLT, was the ability to use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. And it’s very hard in a social media-mediated world to truly know what the world is thinking because you have these minority illusions. You have this world that you see when you log onto Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. You have a set of norms, values, virtues that you can see based on that feed and on that scroll in that time. And you can associate from reading that, “Oh, this is how everybody feels in the entire world.” But often it’s what some psychologists call a minority illusion—you’re just getting this tiny sliver of the world and you’re convincing yourself that that’s the entire world. We live in a strange period today where we don’t know what the world is thinking, but we think we know what the world is thinking, and we allow that illusion to affect and infect our opinions constantly. And I think that somewhat berserks constitutional democracy in all kinds of ways, because people are often voting on misconceptions of what the world thinks.
I love the example from Arlie Russell Hochschild, who is a sociologist who does lots of wonderful work in rural Kentucky and rural Appalachia. I was talking to her about the fact that many people in rural Kentucky—places in rural Kentucky that are the most virulently anti-immigrant—had the strongest views of anti-immigration. If you look at a color-coded map of immigrant share of each congressional district’s population, the parts of America with the fewest immigrants are rural Appalachia. They could use so many more immigrants to help their local economies. These people were not voting or making up their minds based on their lived experience of the world in rural Kentucky. They were watching Fox News—Hochschild told me the largest piece of furniture in their houses was often the television set itself. They were hearing what was happening throughout the rest of the country and they were inferring an opinion about their own local politics. And I do think that pluralistic ignorance, spirals of silence, the way that we can more easily delude ourselves by misunderstanding universal opinion, is a direct threat to liberal democracy. I think it’s something that your book identifies really brilliantly.
Pinker: I think a great example. I’ll mention one other. When people think about the failures of markets, they often think of depressions, crashes, bubbles, bank failures—the Great Depression being the prime example. And these are all examples of common knowledge phenomena, namely, a bank run occurs when there’s a panic in which people think that the bank can’t cover its deposits. They don’t even have to think that, they might think that other people think that; they may not even think that other people think that, they may think that other people think that other people think that other people think that. That is sufficient for people to run for the exits, to try to withdraw their savings before everyone else does, while there are savings left to withdraw. That can occur across an an entire economy when you have crashes.
Conversely, there are bubbles, like the crypto bubble or the tulip bubble several centuries earlier, where an asset rises out of common expectation that, “I know this is worthless, but other people think it’s going to be worth more in the future, so I’ll invest now in the hopes of unloading it on a greater fool in the future,” which continues until it pops. And a lot of the cynicism about markets is driven by those episodes, such as depressions and recessions and crashes, which are generated by common expectation of common expectation. So it’s a problem that I don’t know if Adam Smith anticipated; maybe he did—he seems to have anticipated everything. But it probably wasn’t until the Great Depression that the first solutions to that problem of markets came. In the case of [Franklin] Roosevelt, he actually alluded to common knowledge when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which was not a feel-good bromide, but an actual diagnosis of what had happened. And federal deposit insurance was one solution to the problem. The Federal Reserve is a lender of last resort. It’s still an unsolved problem. There still can be bubbles and crashes, as we saw in 2008.
So it’s a kind of recurring vulnerability of markets driven by the phenomenon of common knowledge, but sets the markets being a solution to generating affluence, bubbles, crashes, and panics being a problem raised by that solution, a problem of which we in turn have some solutions, but not adequate ones yet.
Question (Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University): Derek, you had a comment that liberalism is seen as bloodless. There’s a lot of post-liberal criticism about not only a lack of meaning, but of community, morals, bonding. How do we get this from liberalism? Steven, your suggestions of what could give meaning are all big, noble things—things for other people, mostly. Poverty, world peace, etc. And I’m wondering how you both think that will this address this post-liberal longing? How can liberalism, if it is bloodless or only has these big, noble, moral goals, address this need for community, bonding, closeness?
Thompson: I think it’s interesting that Steve’s first answer about defining liberalism mentioned Obama two or three times. I do kind of see Obama as the apex predator of modern political liberalism. I think he’s profoundly lowercase liberal in his marrow. And when you think about his political success, how much did it really have to do with Millesian liberalism? I’m not sure that an academic liberalism was at its core. What was at its core were other features: an optimism that people found inspiring; a kind of ineffable televisual charisma; an ability to diagnose the sort of cultural malady of the moment, which was cynicism about the Bush government, and offer the remedy to that, which was an optimism that spanned or exceeded and transcended politics. “There are no red states, no blue states, there’s the United States of America”—in a weird way, it’s hard to imagine someone saying that today. And yet, in 2004, when he first said it in that DNC [speech], it resonated. When I think about political success, I think that people vote for ideas to a certain extent—but they also vote for people. So it can sometimes be a bit messy to say, “Did a political ideology win this election? Or was it a person who’s a bundle of a thousand different things? Their charisma and their moment and their message.”
“So we have now the freedom to live alone, to define our own social circles. That does create the problem that we don’t have them there by default. We don’t necessarily have a friend or a relative that we can count on if we’re suddenly in trouble. It’s a problem we haven’t yet solved. But it’s not an unmitigated disaster. In a sense, the greater freedom that we have was the solution to the problem of the oppressiveness of religion, family, and traditional roles.” — Steven Pinker
On the second point that you made about community, I’ve written a lot about what I call “the anti-social century.” Face-to-face socializing has declined 20% this century. The share of people under 24 who say that they attend or host a social gathering on any given day has declined 70% in the last 21 years. I see that crisis as being a technological crisis for the most part, rather than a crisis of ideology or a crisis of illiberalism. I think in many ways we happen to design a lot of technologies that make it very, very convenient to be alone and at home. I don’t say that it’s a story of liberalism, but I’m open to any suggestions that the solution to this problem might draw from the liberal literature.
Pinker: Yeah, I think the decline of community—at least part of it—is technologically driven. Decades before, when I didn’t have an air conditioner and when there were only three networks on TV, there was a lot of motive to get out of the house, to go to public events, to go to other people’s houses. Now that I’ve got a beautiful big OLED TV and air conditioning and so on, it’s so much more convenient to stay home. It doesn’t hurt me, but I can imagine other people with that temptation could be a lot lonelier. And Derek’s article was quite brilliant in pointing that out.
But just zooming out a little bit, this is a problem of especially the last 10, 15 years, I think?
Thompson: Yeah. I mean, Robert Putnam writes Bowling Alone in 2000, and it creates a debate where people say either, “Oh, Putnam’s pointing out something that’s real. We’re having declining social capital.” And other people say, “No, this is just hogwash. Everything’s fine.” I’m only talking about the last 25 years since Putnam wrote Bowling Alone. So I think this has been happening since the 1960s, or, I don’t know, the 1890s, since the invention of air conditioning, maybe.
Pinker: Let me just zoom out a bit. I think that’s another example of “solutions create problems,” because although we like to romanticize traditional close-knit communities and families, many people experience those as highly repressive. A lot of the 19th-century novels, a lot of the rock songs up through the ’60s and ’70s, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, were all about how oppressive it was to live in a close-knit community, in a rural community in which everyone knew what you were doing. You went into your father’s business. If there was a scandal in the family, it ruined your life by reputation. There were no opportunities. For women in traditional religious societies, such as my wife, she ran screaming from her orthodox, close-knit community because it meant that she couldn’t write on the Sabbath, she had to spend hours in the kitchen cooking for a big family, she had to spend a month cleaning up the house before Passover. She was very happy to lose that close-knit community. And people now write to her from traditional Muslim communities, Christian communities, about how they, too, feel trapped and oppressed.
“We live in a strange period today where we don’t know what the world is thinking, but we think we know what the world is thinking, and we allow that illusion to affect and infect our opinions constantly.” — Derek Thompson
So we have now the freedom to live alone, to define our own social circles. That does create the problem that we don’t have them there by default. We don’t necessarily have a friend or a relative that we can count on if we’re suddenly in trouble. It’s a problem we haven’t yet solved. But it’s not an unmitigated disaster. In a sense, the greater freedom that we have was the solution to the problem of the oppressiveness of religion, family, and traditional roles.
Question (Jennifer Godinez, Race Forward): We have been talking about the far right—that it has a clear white supremacist agenda. Clearly, that’s not going to solve a multiracial democracy issue. It’s just going to create more problems. ICE, for example, is not really an immigration solution. It’s very xenophobic. They’re picking up citizens as well. So I want to know, in terms of a liberal agenda, how are we really shaping an identity as a multiracial nation? And I’d love to know who’s shaping your thinking about race relations as liberals.
I think a great modern liberal and humanist is Martin Luther King Jr. I went back to his text: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? There are also several Latino sociologists and others who we really need to bring into this canon. Because, if we’re looking to solve the issue of, “How do we become a multiracial nation?” ... I’m not going to become any less Latina as we move forward just so that the far right doesn’t attack me. We know we’re going to have Muslims in communities, the Appalachian area, we’re going to have people who are going to need economic support. So who’s really shaping your thinking on race relations and the liberal agenda?
Thompson: I would say I’m very much a maximalist when it comes to a booming multi-ethnic democracy in America. When it comes to immigration politics, immigration policy, there’s not a lot to be optimistic about right now. And, in a way, the degree to which I am optimistic, and I am sort of dispositionally optimistic, Donald Trump is an extraordinary vehicle for turning 52% of the American population against whatever he just decided to do. In many ways, the Biden administration’s policies and immigration, which I think went too far on asylum, were a profound and direct reaction to the first Trump administration. And during the Biden administration, you saw that the number of people who were for liberalizing immigration policy declined, and now you see it coming back up.
You see it also with free trade, interestingly, with Trump. If you ask Americans right now, and you break them out by ideology, how do you feel about free trade? The people who are most positive about free trade today aren’t conservatives or moderate conservatives or centrists or moderate centrists—it’s people who identify themselves as “very liberal.” And the line over time—the time series—is like, dut dut dut dut ... “Oh, I suddenly decided I’m very free trade.”
So one way that I’m optimistic about this, and that I began to think about reconstituting a multi-ethnic liberal coalition in the Democratic Party, is to observe that Donald Trump, despite somehow winning popularity contests, is paradoxically, fantastically unpopular. And whatever he does policy-wise tends to generate a really profound backlash that the opposition can use, if it’s sensible to use it, in a way that can build sustainable momentum behind it. I think the Biden administration went too far in that regard, but I do think that there’s absolutely a path forward on immigration policy that can liberalize immigration policy in the next administration and administrations after that. It’s probably not going to come from allowing unprecedented numbers of people to pass over the border in a way that creates a headline for Fox News to run day after day after day after day after day. I think what you probably want is a quieter liberalization of immigration policy that coincides with more security at the border to make sure that there are no headlines of that kind.
Pinker: Yeah, I agree with that. I’ll add a couple of things. The issue of immigration has been conflated with the issue of illegal immigration. I watched a debate with Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke and the question of immigration came up and Cruz, who I despise, said, “My position is simple: legal, good; illegal, bad.” Now, that’s kind of a hard thing to disagree with. And a huge mistake of liberalism would be to be on the side of lawlessness, as it unfortunately has been a number of times, such as in the slogan, defund the police or abolish the police. That’s just a losing proposition, not only on basis of principle, because rule of law ought to be a foundational principle of liberalism, but because, especially when it comes to policing, people really don’t like living in a dangerous neighborhood, and they will vote for whoever will promise to reduce crime.
That’s a bit of a digression from a multiracial society. I think that that is very much worth aspiring to, and again, it is by no means romantic or idealistic. There’s research from social evolutionary psychology, done by Leda Cosmides and the late John Tooby, that actually race is very superficial in people’s perception. What people are sensitive to is coalitions—of tribes, of factions that appear to be in competition. Whether they have the same skin color or not, people often or easily forget. What often happens is that sometimes you’ve got coalitions that tend to correlate with race and then race becomes more salient. But as long as people think that we’re all Americans, then they can very easily overlook the difference between Black, white, and Hispanic.
And it’s been one of the tragedies, I think, of leftism to elevate identity, to make it as salient as possible in countless policies, not just racial preferences, but in training sessions and to just make people constantly paying attention to race and everyone else that might push in the wrong direction. But in an earlier period of mass immigration, the first decades of the 20th century, there were similar fears of, “How can we have a society that’s going to have Jews and Italians and Poles and Germans and Irish? They’re all going to hate each other’s guts.” And, in fact, in those decades, they did. But there was also an ethic of the melting pot and now the idea that the Irish neighborhood would be at war with the German neighborhood or the Polish neighborhood seems rather quaint. We’ve kind of moved beyond that. I think there’s no reason we can’t move beyond that in the case of African American, European American, Latino, and so on.
Question (Sergei Lopatin): I’m a high schooler who reads way too much Substack. I also don’t read too much David Hume or Popper, sorry. Hope you can lay this one off. You laid out some very good and very clear guidelines on liberalism and I’m just wondering if now, especially since Republicans are mainly in power, do you have any [recommended] changes to the original concept of liberalism? In mid 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, there was a change in liberalism—they were losing elections and needed to change their way of thinking and then, because of that, they started to win. So, do you think that there are any changes to liberalism that need to be made to change the Democratic Party and have it start winning? And what do you think those are?
Pinker: Very good question. Liberals, or anyone, have to be prepared to learn, to be empiricists, to find out what isn’t working, including how to win elections, but also what is leading to a better life for citizens, what’s making people better off or worse off. Here I think that Derek’s work on abundance is relevant. A number of policy changes that had noble goals when they were implemented as they started to accumulate worked against people’s well-being and made housing unaffordable and had other unforeseen consequences. So it’s time to recalibrate and say, “Well, we’ve gone too far in protecting neighborhood character and the environment and hiring and so on.” So that would be one kind of redirection.
I think that successful Democratic politicians like Bill Clinton recognize that people don’t like feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods and that reducing crime, often branded as a Republican and right-wing issue, should be assimilated by the left. In the case of Clinton, we saw the greatest reduction in violent crime probably in American history in a liberal president who took the problem of crime seriously. In every decade, there’ll be different problems—maybe a completely open border, certainly climate change going forward—although the solutions can’t be ones that force lower- and middle-class people to pay more for home heating oil and for gasoline. So the problem of how to address climate change without putting the burden on vast numbers of voters is a problem that liberals have to take seriously. There’s no one answer. The meta answer is: Be open to unforeseen problems, to new problems, to side effects, and constantly be updating with new solutions to the problems created by the old solutions.
Thompson: I was hoping when I called on you that you would get Steve to plug my book. So thank you for that really brilliantly articulated question.
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No we can't abolish poverty or the poor -- since so much of that is relative, and driven by Pareto distributions.....but also in a more general sense, Jesus was talking about suffering. Suffering is part of the human condition. And the liberal-utopian idea that we can abolish suffering has always created a murderous totalitarian nightmare. Even were we to succeed, the result would be the destruction of humanity -- which is what Huxley understood in Brave New World. I don't want liberal utopians like Pinker to run around with the idea that they can fix everything.
The label "liberalism" has undergone significant semantic drift. To argue about it in a meaningful manner, it is first necessary to define it. I did that here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanblake/p/the-liberal-manifesto
Does anyone disagree? Please let me know in the comments.