Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Martin Gurry. He's been on the program before. He's a writer,

a former CIA analyst, a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center. He studies the relationship

between politics and media. We've published in a number of his pieces in

City Journal. His work has also appeared in the New York Post, Free Press, and other publications.

He posts regularly on his blog, The Fifth Wave, and he's the author of, among other works,

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Today, though, we're going to discuss his recent essay for us prologue to an ideology of freedom.

It appears in our winter issue and presents Martin's guide to transcending the current political moment,

I guess, is how we could describe it.

So Martin, Guri, very, very happy to have you back on

Tem Block. Great to be here. So in this essay, you write that the world today presents a picture of

chaos, basically. The complexities of modern society require expert management, yet public

trust in experts and elites is extremely low right now.

Governments, legislatures, bureaucrats, regulators, they've turned to what you describe as an

ideology of control to tame public opinion and impose conformity, and this isn't going very well.

So I wonder if you expand on that particular

theme and explain how you see this conflict, an open conflict now, between elite authority and

democratic ideals. Well, I wish it were quite that clean cut, but essentially what is happening

with the elites is a reactionary move.

Jonathan Haidt says our moment is a little bit like the Tower of Babel.

There's a lot of people screaming and they seem like they're speaking mutually unintelligible

languages.

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