Upon reconsidering...

The keys to preserving good government, democracy, and informed consent are individual thinking, reading, education, conversation with people of different points of view, and protecting one’s attention from the onslaught of social media. These have composed the theme of my blog since 2018.

As I reconsider matters, I may be wrong. I may be too optimistic about the ability of the individual to think independently, save for a very few. If you read Question Authority: a Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell, or almost any of the other books (see below) on democracy, reading, speaking, and independent thought, you can see that some people can do it, but most are too inhibited by the normal busy-ness of life, or the influence of a particular group in person or on line, or habituation, or several or all of these.

Other books which posit ways to be in this minority are Moral Ambition: How to Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman; A Different Kind of Power: a Memoir, by Jacinda Adern; Open Socrates: the Case for a Philosophical Life, by Agnes Callard; The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: the Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times, by Robin Reames; Think Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in an Age of AI, by David Weitzner; and At a Loss for Words: Conversation in the Age of Rage, by Carol Off. I have discussed most of these in earlier blog posts.¹

A newer contribution is Look Again: the Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein. They posit that habituation is a key risk in how we get along in life. We develop habits so that it will not be necessary to make a new decision about everything we do each day. But it is necessary to stand aside from habits to see what is really around us.

Discussing habituation’s ability to hide things from us, they cite books by people who interviewed Germans after the war who claimed to be unaware of Hitler’s reign of terror. They warn that fascism can creep so slowly as to be almost unnoticeable by most – tiny increments that make people ask, “Well, this is only a little step beyond the last, so maybe it doesn’t matter.”

They also cite Sharot’s experiments which demonstrate that people can habituate to their own lying, i.e., lying becomes easier with repetition, as does accepting lies from others. There is an “illusory truth effect,” the tendency to believe much-repeated statements. There is also a “truth bias,” the tendency to believe what we hear.

They recommend ways that people should extract themselves from their habitual behaviours, especially social media addiction, and from habituated attitudes, so they can perceive what really is happening, or not happening. Particularly interesting is an experiment with a purposely-created social media stream which provided choices of “trust/distrust” in place of “like”: it demonstrates that considering the truthfulness of just one statement can put you on guard against other statements.

Finally, they describe examples of “dishabituation entrepreneurs,” who can urge others who are likely to question information things, to do so, and encourage still others (as in the example below of the four MAGA subdivisions). They give interesting examples of these people, but they haven’t found research which explains how they became dishabituation entrepreneurs. I think my readers, and I myself, are such people. My attitude is that, if everyone around me thinks something is a good idea, probably none of them has looked at it closely; so I will. Adopting reconsidering as the central purpose, and informed consent as the central value, of this blog, show the results.

However, you may be convinced by these books that my case is weak:

Enshitification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow; (the thesis is in the title);

Public Opinion, by Walter Lippman. Lippman was recruited by Woodrow Wilson to run the propaganda bureau during WWI. He was profoundly discouraged by the effectiveness of his work, because people could be so easily fooled and manipulated. He wrote this in 1922. If the techniques of that age a century ago were effective, how much more the current efforts!

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, and The Nature and Destiny of Man, and Man’s Nature and His Communities:^:Niebuhr was a preacher in a Detroit inner-city blue-collar church, professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York from the 1930’s into the 1960’s, and a frequent secular press commentator. His works were extraordinarily persuasive for his secular audience, and are often quoted even these days. He espoused “Christian realism,” which in the secular world was adapted as “political realism.” He taught that the individual may have great morals and ethics, but that it is difficult, if not impossible, to scale up those values into the larger society because of competing values and private interests. He believed, as a theologian, that the essential problem is that individuals strive to be greater than themselves, to accomplish even greater feats, to be more influential and powerful than at the moment, and yet to suffer from the deep inner knowledge that they have human limits and are not really gods. Yet some people will try to act as if they really are gods, amassing power and possessions, and then becoming terribly afraid that someone else will discern their real human limitations or will try to take their power and possessions from them; no matter how much power and no matter how many possessions, they will not relinquish any.

(I note that his depiction of powerful people strongly resembles JRR Tolkien’s explanation of the significance of the dragon in human lore, as described by Tim Snyder in his “Thinking about…” column of January 31 {Substack}:

“Dragons assemble huge wealth, appreciating only its quantity, but taking no joy in any particular object. They are enraged if any one piece were to go missing. They are obsessed to the point of paranoia with thieves.” You may note some possible similarity to current political actors.)

The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing: the very nature of liberal democracy makes it extremely vulnerable to being overtaken by authoritarianism, legally and legitimately.

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart, by Nicholas G. Carr: the more people involved in communication, the more chaotic and less beneficial the result. Examples: even the early days of telegraphy saw deliberate efforts to use the speed of communication to spread false information faster than it could be evaluated and corrected. Marconi’s shore-to-ship communication was used by people on shore to send bogus location information regarding bogus emergencies at sea, causing futile rescue efforts.

Determined: a Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky: the title says it all.

The Optimism Bias: a Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, by Tali Sharot: we are biologically wired toward optimism as a way of getting through.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness⁷, by Jonathan Haidt: particularly Gen Z have been trained by life on the smart-phone to live more on-line than off, and this generation have real difficulty relating to people in person.

Or, you may like the middle ground offered by David Brooks’ essay “What are we Thinking?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/neuroscience-thinking-human.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share).

He is fascinated with the metaphor of the murmuring of starlings, where individuals behave in concert with the others to instantaneously and frequently move en masse to avoid danger (building on https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-human-brain-is-like-a-murmuration-of-starlings by Luiz Pessoa).

Brooks suggests that this illustrates how, together with Pessoa’s “entangled brain”, we ought to regard ourselves and others: as momentary embodiments of specific intentions and actions (“…emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves”). We are sets of processes, rather than blocks of immutable wood, and so we ought to be careful about how we define each other — a person can move fluidly from one personification to another quite suddenly and often, defeating our categorization of them.

Yet, there is knowledge and understanding to be gained from grouping and categorizing portions of such murmurings, as illustrated in the organization U.S. More in Common’s “Beyond MAGA: the Four Types of MAGA Voters” (https://moreincommon.substack.com/p/beyond-maga-the-four-types-of-trump?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-restack-comment&r=49t5v&triedRedirect=true ). Perceiving these four groups helps to discern shifts in behaviour and motivation, and offers opportunities to find and talk with one of the groups whose values may seem not too distant from our own.

Having reconsidered all these, I return to my thesis that “individual thought, reading, education, conversation with people of different points of view, and protecting one’s attention from the onslaught of social media, are the keys to preserving good government, democracy, and informed consent.” This can be done, if only by a minority such as readers of this blog. Yet, we can see that even murmurings have sub-groups; there are minorities there and if they change their minds for some reason, others’ behaviour will be changed, too, and possibly their minds. No promises or guarantees, but a good likelihood (see Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, for examples of the influence of a few over many).

¹Reconsidering again, part 2: how to develop independent informed consent to preserve Democracy – Upon reconsidering…;

Keeping Hold of Your Attention – Upon reconsidering…