How a Philosopher You've Never Heard of Predicted The End of The World
Without even knowing it...
Way back when, a philosopher named Donald Davidson wrote a handful of essays, including one with a wicked title, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” He didn’t know it at the time, but he predicted the end of the world.
(If you’ve heard of him, you get a gold star.)
Over the course of these essays, Davidson explained the foundations of human communication. I’ll paraphrase:
In order to have a meaningful conversation with someone, you have to assume they’re a pretty reasonable person with reasonable beliefs. You have to share the same world, the same reality. You have to respect each other.
Well, so much for that.
Donald Davidson died in 2003, before smartphones and social media, a few months after the invasion of Iraq. He probably never even heard of the phrase “echo chamber,” at least not the way we use it now. He never experienced the dopamine high from demolishing a troll online, followed by the letdown when you realized they were just a bot. He never had any encounters with sea lions, a particular kind of troll who pretends to want a civil debate. Imagine bringing him back to life, 22 years later, and letting him get up to speed on everything. Americans are living in different realities, and they don’t communicate so much as they troll, concern troll, sealion, victim signal, and virtue signal all day long.
One group of Americans doesn’t believe in viruses. They believe vaccines make you sick. They believe weather machines cause hurricanes. They believe space lasers cause wildfires. They believe girls who identify as cats are using litterboxes at school instead of toilets. They believe social safety nets make you weak (at least until they need them). They want to deport their political opponents—if not assassinate them outright. They’re okay with ICE arresting their wives and girlfriends. Our president jokes about rounding up citizens he doesn’t like, condemning them to life in a swamp, and teaching them how to run from alligators.
Senators pass bills without even reading them, then they act surprised when they find out those bills will kill thousands of their own voters.
Any common ground here, any shared world?
If so, it’s hard to see.
Artificial intelligence almost convinced a tech bro he was living in the Matrix, and he could escape it by jumping off a roof. It’s been trying to get the rest of us to eat rocks and abandon our families.
Before going back to his grave to roll over a few times, Donald Davidson might have a few things to say. He might quote David Byrne:
You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.
We’re talking at each other more than ever, in more mediums than ever, and it never stops. And yet, no communication is happening. Hardly anyone in the halls of power is exchanging information anymore. Even within their own parties, people stuff words in each other’s mouths and sling around ludicrous accusations all day long, and they act like it’s accomplishing something.
It’s not.
Humans are social creatures. If we can’t communicate with each other in order to take on our biggest threats, we’re kinda screwed.
Our biggest threat isn’t terrorism. It’s not socialism. It’s not immigrants. It’s not trans athletes. It’s not Iran. It’s not China. It’s not Russia. It’s not any of the things any of our politicians ever talk about. Our biggest threats all happen to come from the actions of a few extremely greedy individuals.
The world is pretty much coming to an end. While the physical planet may eventually recover from the Anthropocene, the era when humans pumped so much carbon into the atmosphere it canceled the next ice age, our civilization as we know it has an expiration date. We’re going to run out of fossil fuels. We won’t replace them with renewable energy in time, if that were even possible. Our weather is spiraling out of control, and our government’s latest budget pretty much guarantees we never do anything about any of these problems. Look around, the only thing our countries can agree on is a global increase in military spending.
They’re all planning to fight each other.
The leaders of the world, and the United States in particular, have absolutely no plan beyond the next election cycle. It shows.
So, what’s our biggest threat?
Davidson called it.
Our biggest threat has always been the same: that we would give up the ability to engage in meaningful communication at all, that we would continue to make all kinds of sounds at each other, but we’d just be blathering about completely different things, no longer trying to see someone else’s perspective, just making a bunch of noise and doing a bunch of nothing.
Another language philosopher would like to chime in. Mikhail Bakhtin had a great term to explain the kind of communication we do now.
He called it the super addressee.
When you talk to someone, but you’re really speaking to a third person indirectly, you call that third party the super addressee.
Here’s an example:
Politicians get up and deliver big speeches in Congress, but they’re not talking to each other. They’re talking to their fans. They go on CNN or Fox News and act like they’re talking to news anchors or viewers. But they’re not.
They’re talking to their donors.
Think of the super addressee as an eavesdropper they know about, a fly on the wall they can see, and that fly on the wall is the only thing they care about. They lie to their voters. They lie to their opponents. They speak in veiled truths to their super addressees, their donors, their corporate overlords. If there’s any genuine communication happening anymore, it’s that coded language between public figures and the megarich who sign their campaign checks.
The vast majority of influencers do the same thing. They generate an endless stream of podcasts, videos, listicles, and audiobooks telling us the secret to success lies in working your ass off at 5 am and enduring a life of poverty. Their billionaire benefactors smile and nod. They know better.
David’s notion of communication depended on what he called a “shared world,” and that’s precisely the world that has ended.
Who shares a world now?
America’s 800 billionaires, worth a grand total of $6.72 trillion, don’t want to share a world with us. They’re doing everything they can to get off this world. They want to live on a different planet altogether.
The most powerful nations on earth don’t act like they’re interested in sharing a world. Trump’s rabid MAGA base doesn’t act like they want to share a world. They want to “own” their political opponents, even at their own expense. They might even swallow the latest bill condemning them to an early death. As they lay dying in a Faulknerian hellscape without medical care, some of them will console themselves with the fact that somewhere deep in the Everglades, someone they’ve taught themselves to hate is having an even worse time.
Can’t we all just get along?
Most of us can’t even coexist on the same social media platforms anymore. We use one and refuse to touch the others.
We watch different TV channels. We go to different websites. We have our own chat rooms and discussion threads. We watch different news coverage of the same events. Search engines tailor their results to our biases. ChatGPT tells everyone what they want to hear, to keep them engaged.
These days, you can even have your own money. Don’t like the U.S. dollar? You can dump your life savings into the currency of your choice.
Want to keep all your money in fartcoin?
Knock yourself out.
In a world of deepfakes, we no longer share a world. So, Donald Davidson would be forced to admit, the shared world is dead.
The other worlds won’t be long.
Everyone lives in their own fantasy now, believing what they want and calling everything else fake if it makes them sad or uncomfortable.
Of course, humans have always had a hard time accepting facts. We all have a habit of rejecting information we don’t want to hear, especially when it challenges our beliefs about the world. We all want certain things to be true.
Psychologists call that habit information disconfirmation. If someone doesn’t want to believe something, they dismiss it as false. They question the reliability of the source. It’s easy, and it makes them sound smart.
Technology feeds that habit.
The more advanced our devices, the better they get at presenting the world we like most, regardless of whether it’s real or shared.
As for solutions, we have plenty. But they call on each of us to give up our little worlds and embrace a single, shared reality. Most people just don’t want to do that, and it’s not just a problem with MAGA. It’s an everyone problem.
I’m on the left, and I happen to believe that if we’re going to take on fascism, if we want our remaining time on this planet to avoid the deepest depths of human cruelty, we have to recognize that even though we have to share the world with everyone, not everyone wants to share a world with us.
If you can’t share a world…
The real world ends.
I once met David Byrne in a coffee shop in Berkeley, California close to where he lived. He was having tea at a table by himself, so I asked if I could join him and everyone else seems to have passed by not knowing who was in their company. I gave no indication that I knew who he was. The only question I asked when I left the table was, is there anything I can do to be of service to you before I leave? He said yes. He said I was thinking about ordering a tuna salad sandwich, but I can’t eat the whole thing. Would you share it with me? It was a great lunch.
I have long thought that we stopped talking to one another when the smartphone and internet was invented. I'm old enough to remember the first internet chat boards in the mid-1980's and things took off from there. This was even before cell phones were invented for public use.
We'll never be the same anymore and it continues to get worse every year. You're right, it won't be much longer before the only talking that will be taking place between people will be from behind a gun barrel. At least in the west anyway. While we destroy one another, the far east will be looking on and smiling behind polite hands over their mouths.
The U.S. empire is finished and is slowly heading towards a big fall. Like a very large tree that the ground underneath will no longer support anymore, causing the tree to slowly tilt over until a big storm comes along someday and finally knocks it to the ground. The U.S. is leaning over pretty hard right now, waiting for that big storm to make that one last push. No one knows when that will be but it's only a matter of time.
That's what happens when people stop talking to one another and there is only one person demanding everyone pay attention to them. Everyone else points a finger at someone else and eventually they grab a gun.