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This is the final of four pieces concerned with the character of new atheist fanatic Sam Harris. (Those who wish to catch up, start here.) Today’s instalment draws together all the strings of Harris’s unfortunate shortcomings as a role model. My aim is to drive home the bonafide danger presented by those who, like Harris, are entirely out of touch with their psyches, and are consequently incapable of self-evaluation. In what follows, you will see Harris going completely off the rails, all the while insisting that he’s being entirely rational.
In mid-August of 2022 Sam Harris participated in a Youtube interview series called Triggernometry and spoke in support of the “open conspiracy” among Left-leaning Americans in the media, the FBI, the judiciary, Congress, etc. to mislead the American public ahead of the 2020 presidential election in order to tilt public opinion against Donald Trump (to prevent him from winning the U.S. presidency for a second term).
In other words, it turns out that Harris actually is all for lying, cheating, and censorship if it suits his ends. A far cry from Socrates and his fidelity to respecting and upholding the Good and the laws of his place and time even unto his own death. So much for the Kantian categorical imperative—and that kinda trash. Harris’s sort of self-serving flexibility reminds one more of the Marquis de Sade and Machiavelli.
So far, my summary of this part of the Triggernometry interview does not quite capture the shocking level of irrational rhetoric Harris deployed. I also don’t want readers feeling that I’ve perhaps skewed or exaggerated Harris’s position. So let’s take a closer look at his convoluted reasoning. About twenty-four minutes into the conversation, Triggernometry co-host Konstantin Kisin pressed his guest on the topic of censorship, misinformation and disinformation in the lead up to the 2020 elections:
Kisin: Do you really want to live in a country where you have a digital public square. . . which in my opinion Twitter is. . . We can disagree about that if you want, but that’s my opinion. It’s a digital public square. And you have a company that has clearly one-sided enforcement. I, I hear what you’re saying by deligitimizing the electoral process, that Trump did. And I was concerned about that. I think you can’t question the system in that way. [Worth noting that Hillary Clinton did not accept the results of the 2016 election that brought Trump into office and that it’s common practice in the U.S.A. to question election results.] But when you see that he gets banned and then the story about Hunter Biden gets banned under the guise of Russian disinformation; we later learn it wasn’t Russian disinformation. That, to a lot of people, seems like—you know, I said it when we were talking to Joe Rogan—it’s putting your hand on the scales. . . in favour of one side. . . in the digital public square; you add that to the banning of Trump and lots of other people being banned from one side predominantly. Is that? Is that the world you want to live in? Where one team gets to just ban people it disagrees with off the platform? It gets to pretend that things that are true are not true? It gets to shut down the sharing of information with people who want to make their own democratic choice? (24:29 - 25:40)
Following some further back and forth, Harris replied, “I think it was totally appropriate to view Trump in a . . . to be existing in a, in a domain that was orthogonal to partisan politics. I, my criticism of Trump is totally non-partisan, right?”
Harris then proceeded tangentially to argue that he was not being political in his loathing of Trump, using some specious and besides-the-point reasoning to exonerate himself from the sort of bias that might undermine his assessment. I will leave it to viewers to decide whether this was an exercise in self-deception. To my mind, Harris was engaging in anything but “intellectual honesty” (a quality of which he claimed in the same interview to be a paragon). He then continued to explain his problem with Trump without providing a single empirical example of the former president’s failures, and without invoking a single criminal act, using the most inarticulate and irrational terms he could muster, though peppered with gussied-up jargon:
The Trump phenomenon is not a matter of political partisanship. He, he is a, he’s just a sui generis, ah, phenomenon. And it’s. . . Again it’s analogous to having elected Alex Jones president of the United States. [Worth noting that Kisin had already made it clear that this analogy to Jones was unsound.] It’s, it’s, it’s a compl. . . I probably agree with half his policies or probably more than half his policies. It’s not a matter of policy. It’s a matter of having someone who is totally unfit to have power, be given more power than any person in a generation. And he’s unfit for. . . in every possible way. It’s like, it’s not, it’s not that he’s got a few screws loose. Like every screw is loose. Every screw that you would want totally cranked down is loose or non-existent in him. Um. And. . .So yeah, it’s. . . tha-that’s my argument. It’s like, you know. . . my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of Big Tech and journ- and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a, a once in a lifetime moral emergency. Right? Whereas, this is not the same thing as not liking George Bush, you know, or not liking John McCain or not liking Mitt Romney, for their politics. This was: here’s a guy who is capable of anything. Right? He’s not ideological. But he’s, again, he’s, he’s a black hole of selfishness. Right? He’s he’s, he’s just. . . So there’s no telling what he’s going to do. Um. And we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy. Right? And, and so. . . Um. So what, what should well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways—you’re running the New York Times, you’re running CNN, you’re running Twitter—what should they conspire to do under these conditions? (29:50 - 32:58)
Following a few minutes more of Harris’s frankly adolescent burblings on matters Trump, Kisin and his co-host Francis Foster attempted to reign him in, explaining that one cannot argue for total bias against a political figure and in favour of another to the point of total suppression of one constituency. Uncomfortable laughter ensued, and one has the sense that the show hosts felt Harris had engaged in some over-the-top rhetoric and didn’t really mean what he’d said. But just as the interviewers were ready to move on, Harris felt the need to further explain, and this is when Harris revealed that he was indeed an imbalanced extremist and not the rationalist he pretends to be:
Yeah, no but I’ll just say, just finally. I, I do. Again. It’s like a coin-toss for me, the Hunter Biden laptop thing. Because I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty in how they. . . It’s like they couldn’t even frame it honestly. It’s not like they. . . It’s not like. . . The way I would frame it is: Listen, I don’t care what’s in Hunter Biden’s . . . I mean Hunter Biden. . . At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. Right? . . there’s nothing. First of all, it’s Hunter Biden, right; it’s like, it’s not Joe Biden. But even if Joe Biden. Like whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is. Like if, if we could go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right? . . or China. . . [Significantly, Biden had (not long prior to this interview) chosen to “defend” Ukraine against Russia.] It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in: it’s like, it’s like, it’s like a firefly to the sun. [Note that Trump didn’t start any new wars and was on friendly terms with Putin.] Right? I mean like there, there’s just. . . It doesn’t even, it doesn’t even stack up against Trump University. Right? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden’s laptop, in my view. Right? Now that’s not. That doesn’t answer the people who say, It’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the, you know, the New York Post’s Twitter account. Like that, that, that’s just a conspira- that’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely! Right? But I think it was warranted. (35:35 - 37:24)
Upon hearing these words, Kisin couldn’t help but challenge that final statement, saying, “You’re saying you’re content with the left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically reelected as president.”
Harris: Well no, I’m, I’m conte-. Well, so. But the thing is it’s not left-wing, right? So Liz Cheney is not left-wing. Right?
Kisin: You’re content with a conspiracy to prevent someone being democratically elected.
Harris: No. But it’s not like. But there’s nothing. Conspiracy. It’s not. It was a conspiracy out in the open. But it doesn’t matter what part’s conspiracy, what part’s out in the open. I mean, I think. It’s like, if people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon. You know if, if. It’s like if there, if there was an asteroid hurtling toward earth, and we got in a room together with all of our friends, right? and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? Is that a conspiracy? You know, like some of that conversation would be in public, some of it in private. We have a massive problem. We have an existential threat. Right? Politically speaking I consider Trump an existential threat to our democracy. Right. No. He’s not going to destroy the world, very likely.
Kisin: But if you destroy democracy in the process of protecting democracy. . .(37:41 - 38:46)
At this point, Harris began to back peddle, and the conversation on this topic got wrapped up. Essential to note that what’s at stake here is his rational cover for overtly irrational cogitations. Trump is analogous to “an asteroid”? He represents “an existential threat to democracy”? Trump University is worse than corpses of children in Hunter Biden’s basement? These rubber-legged analogies betray a paranoid imagination without moorings in the outer world.
But based on these unhinged analogies, Harris concludes that collusion, “obvious bias,” journalistic “inconsistency,” “dishonesty” and some measure of conspiracy are all valid means to prevent the reelection of a president about whom Harris phantasises in vivid hyperbole. To his mind, such dysfunctional behaviour—clearly contemptuous of democracy—does not in any way really threaten democracy or obliterate democratic principles. (Kant can stick his categorical imperative where the sun don’t shine.)
How immature to fail to understand that such is the sense of urgency surrounding political elections generally speaking. Sadly, the work of good campaigning is to elicit just such a response of existential threat should one’s political opponent win. That’s politics. Only fools fall for that sort of carnival barking. But to Harris’s mind, he was not being political.
This is why self-development matters. Harris is suppressing a voice inside himself that is shouting to be heard, and it’s saying, “Stop lying! You know this is all bullshit.” But he keeps burbling, and you’ll note that he talks and talks and talks until he’s talked himself into whatever litter of lies he has decided to defend to the death. What is painfully obvious to any viewer is hidden from himself. He won’t give an inch even after it’s clear that there’s nothing rational about his position. He starts splitting irrelevant hairs and flailing about even when he’s been caught up in absurdities. This is a textbook example of Iain McGilchrist’s observations about how the left brain has to be right, and how it is prone in right-brain-damaged patients to deny culpability and confabulate. Harris is clearly a sufferer of left-brainitis. Let him serve as an example of what becomes of one who suppresses his inner world and refuses to embark on the great journey of maturation. Surely we can find better role models.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Sam Harris is a moron, and there's probably no better illustration of TDS than his lunatic rant. Trump hatred in general exposes the hypocrisy of so-called "liberal" elites, not only because Trump symbolizes the working class proles the elites hate even more, but because to be "liberal" in the deepest sense means to love and defend freedom. I don't understand how liberals can champion tyranny and call themselves liberal. But it seems to me that this is where a deeper significance of the Trump phenomenon shows itself. Trump reminds me somehow of the figure of the holy fool. The holy fool is supposed to turn us inward to ridicule our own hypocrisy, and Trump reflects the ridiculousness of our rotten society. His presence should humble us in the face of how far we've fallen as a civilization, and drive us to open our hearts toward each other. I'm not holding my breath.
Ouch. There is one man whose words read so poorly in print that it is impossible to take him seriously. He should give interviews only to the most forgiving sources and should ask to confirm statements attributed to him. I'm like, um, you know? it's gonna be, like, um, rough out there.