![]() ![]() ![]() He does not believe the populists’ rise to become our new elite will ensure their downfall when they fail to deliver on their promises. Rather, the triumph of “the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex” that Trump’s victory represented demands our attention. ![]() But as d’Ancona acknowledges, the least interesting thing about Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Trump stalks his pages like an orange panther. His book, which surely announces his arrival as a first-rate essayist, is just 176 pages but manages to convey a super-abundance of learning without breaking into a sweat. To anyone who is invigorated by urgent writing, Matthew d’Ancona’s work is as startling as a cold shower. Meanwhile, asking why we must worry about cognitive biases now raises equally pertinent questions about how recent history has seen a collapse in faith in the rational ordering of society. For asking why we believe lies raises vast questions about human psychology and history, which did not appear from nowhere in 2016 or emerge with the invention of the web. The authors try to come to terms with the consequences of the web, where no gatekeepers insist you pay the price of accuracy before publishing and lies are given the same status as truth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |