Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. Welcome to 2021.

Thank you to the fine people that make this show possible through either Patreon or the

Contribute What You Think The Show's Worth Model on the website. Today's episode is on the work

of Marshall McCluwen and his views on media and its effects. I hope you love the show today.

So most of us live our lives, not all that confused about the events of the world that are going

on around us. I mean, why would you be? Really? We watch the news, we stay informed, we read books,

when something happens we got a pretty good idea of how the world works. We got a pretty good idea

of human nature and how people are going to behave and reaction to that thing. We got a pretty

good idea of what is possible to expect. But every once in a while occasionally, something

happens in the world that throws us for a loop, something that challenges these ideas we have about

how things work. This thing can seem so bizarre and unexpected that you even start to wonder how any

person could have ever possibly seen it coming. This feeling concerns someone into a bit of a crisis

mode. Did I know as much as I thought I knew about people and the universe? How do you explain this

thing that's happening? What does this mean for the world moving forward? This can be a pretty

uncomfortable place to sit for very long. People naturally want to get back to that comfortable

place of feeling like they can predict the future. So a common strategy when someone's in this

place is to go out and seek out someone who saw this thing coming who can give them answers.

Now, historically, when enough people adopt this strategy, it creates a vacuum for some

answer person to emerge. This could be a public intellectual, this could be a charismatic

order. It doesn't really matter. It just needs to be someone who can provide people with some

clarity about the present situation. They usually do this by making connections between things that

are foreign to the way people are used to thinking about things. Usually by evoking concepts from

...