I suppose two things come to mind as distinctive. Because you’re quite right that many features of the situation are familiar from history, but some factors are unique to our era. The first is the landscape — the technological media landscape has shifted significantly since the advent of the internet.

That sounds obvious, but we often underappreciate how recent this shift is. Because of the rapidity of news and cultural cycles, we forget that even in the 1980s there was no internet. At that time, I would read the New York Times and no other paper — or, when I was living in Canada, the Globe and Mail. People would watch one television news broadcast. So, the kind of radical disintermediation that is characteristic of the technological conditions changes a lot of things, at least at a textural level — at the granular level of what political experience feels like, what civic discourse feels like.

The other big thing, and I’m always a little wary of speaking in such broad terms, is the growing uncertainty over whether the liberal democratic consensus will endure. This model, considered the “right answer” for roughly four centuries, now faces challenges from authoritarian right-wing governments and movements on one side and a kind of revolution in thought on the other — from settler-colonial critique to decolonization — as an alternative to the Enlightenment framework.

This does feel a little different. But of course, it’s impossible to have the necessary bird’s eye to fully grasp these shifts.

There was a moment in the early days of the internet, which I’m old enough to remember, where we genuinely were not just optimistic, but wildly hopeful — in an almost utopian register — about the democratic potential in this kind of radically decentered media landscape. Maybe not surprisingly, depending on how cynical one is about the human experiment, that’s not how things turned out.

Some of the promise is still there: access to both media content and the means to create it is a genuine good. But opening the floodgates has led to polarization and the “raising of the temperature” — which do seem to be features of a chaotic environment. Maybe we’re in a period of chaos after only partially fulfilling that early promise. The future could bring more chaos or a kind of new consolidation, a shakeout.

Looking around now, here in the first quarter of this new millennium, all we can see on the horizon is chaos. But as usual, no one knows what lies beyond that. I would like to believe that this kind of global democratic experiment might continue to bend in a good direction, but what we’re seeing now is clearly the revenge of retrenchment. And the opportunity for authoritarian populism is something that happens when the ground is disarrayed by chaos. Who knows where the sweep goes from here.

The Aristotelian echo is the one I mean to sound here. I’m glad you put it in those terms, because two things are important in my thinking about this, in the sense of intellectual background.

One is evolutionary adaptability. What is going to be a constructive way for us to negotiate a fragile environment in which our persistence as a species is by no means guaranteed? Let’s think at that kind of level — what’s adaptive and what isn’t?

This is part of the smaller-scale argument about civility, which has been a keynote of all my political theorizing from pretty much day one. I started out making positive arguments in favor of civility, but they were always met by vehement objections that civility was a tamping down of dissent or reversion to norms of politeness or aristocratic comportment, that kind of thing. So I switched polarity and started making negative arguments: Incivility is a collective action problem. It’s a race to the bottom. And these sorts of arguments actually have traction because people can see, in a sense, the evolutionary stakes — they can see that if there’s a perverse incentive to meet incivility with even greater incivility, everybody loses for winning.

At the personal level, this links back to the Aristotelian orientation in the Nicomachean Ethics. It’s ethics as virtue, as a matter of habit. And habits, on a day-to-day level, start with imitation: look at exemplars, look at how you want to be, and cultivate the practices that reinforce that wanting.

There’s a reason why I speak about addiction throughout this book. It’s not just my personal experience of it, although that’s in there, but what I call “doxacoholism” — the addiction to the feeling of having the right opinion. It is a toxic drug. It’s a thing that will create and reinforce bad habits — harmful habits.

But by the same token, recovery is not getting rid of habits altogether but cultivating better ones in place of the toxic ones. Everyone can do this in their own way, and while the specifics vary, one of the things I wanted to say, especially toward the end of the book, is that — against all of this abstract philosophizing structural analysis and tectonic, historical sweep — it all comes down to individuals looking at themselves and really deciding how to be in the world.

The quick answer to that is yes, I do believe we can — but I agree that it’s extremely difficult. Not to dwell too much on Aristotle, but he has a kind of protoevolutionary account, which is of flourishing — human flourishing. We have consciousness, we have the capacity to reflect as well as to act, and we should not miss this opportunity — this kind of basic ontological opportunity to take account of our own lives and the actions that make up those lives.

Is it more difficult now than it was then? Sure. Aristotle’s era had a simpler, smaller, homogeneous society that relied on slave labor, was unapologetically male-centric, and allowed citizenship to only a select few. That’s no longer our world, but people are drawn to tribalism today partly because they long for a sense of belonging similar to that.

There’s also a strong pull toward being a cosmopolitan, rational agent in a transnational world — and we can live in the tension if we’re critical enough. But as you mentioned, engaging with certain media can feel like there’s a force pushing you, beyond any urge you had before you turned on your screen. You are now responding to stimuli. There are choices we can make along the way — like turning your computer off, going outside — but it’s undeniably difficult.

I mention Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism in the book, and one of the things that MacIntyre argues is that what we need more than just an account of virtues — we need social roles and a context where those social roles can be enacted. It’s not just a lone battle against the world, and that’s what it feels like when you’re in front of your screen all by yourself. You have to remember that there is a community that you’re a part of, that you are enacting not just your singular fact of consciousness, but that you take up a position within a family, a community, a society. Those things are essential to ethical action in the world.

I like “vandals” as a term, though I myself think of them as grifters, free riders, or even bandits. One kind of answer would be to look at a healthy economy — whether it’s a capitalist economy or mixed economy or whatever — it can tolerate a certain amount of free riding at the margins. In fact, you’re very unlikely to find any economy that doesn’t have some free riders. So we take the bad actors as a marginal cost on the success of the economy overall, and I think that’s not a bad answer for a lot of cases.

I think the example that you give, and other examples like it, show us that you can find at least microeconomies that are dominated by bad actors — where the bad actors are positively incentivized to win at the market, not just to exploit marginal gains for themselves.

One tempting but problematic response is to introduce more regulation. I’m not anti-regulation at all, but I think we have enough experience with regulation to know that regulatory capture is a live possibility. Regulators themselves can become bad actors or be corrupted. Plato makes this point in The Republic: Regulation always invites more regulation, because you need to have rules to determine how the rules get applied, and then you need rules for the rules about the rules that get applied, and so on. It can result in a regulatory regime that becomes itself a form of grift.

Self-regulation is probably the better answer here. Which is to say, we can engage in an economy even when we know some people are taking advantage — we just can’t allow that to justify us becoming grifters ourselves.

Whatever particular political projects I might myself endorse, the background assumption that I have as a liberal, in the philosophical sense, is that people must be free to think whatever they want, and they should be — with very, very minor exceptions — able to express what they think.

I’m not an absolutist about free speech. I think there are limits. I think any sane person recognizes that there’s going to be some question of limits. But you’re right — this openness we have has resulted in mobbing and attendant self-censorship. We see timidity, sometimes from the least likely actors — tenured professors — who are afraid to speak out. I mean, how could you have any more material protections than tenure at a university and a fat bank account — all the things should allow you to be speaking your mind?

Some people are genuinely vulnerable and have good reason to fear the consequences of speaking out. But much of it is just cowardice, frankly. What is the point of all of this access? What is the point of the idea that you should be thinking for yourself unless you are willing to be courageous enough to say something?

I often go back to what inspired me early on: the idea of civil dialogue. Because to my mind, the liberal experiment starts with John Locke and Baruch Spinoza — and the idea that we could potentially stop killing each other over differences in opinion about what counts as salvation — by agreeing to talk through different ideas in a way that respects the ability of people to disagree. That’s a massive human achievement, yet we keep losing sight of it. Freedom, paradoxically, can start undermining itself.

So what do we do about it? In one sense, the obvious answer is, come on, have the guts to speak your mind — and do it respectfully and civilly, because only then can we have a productive exchange and not just be shouting more loudly than the person next to us.

This partly becomes a question of what we might call political psychoanalysis. What is the structure of your desire? What do people really get from this feeling of belonging that comes with mobbing and infectious, toxic, cancel culture?

As I argue, we live in a society that is absolutely welcoming of addictive behavior of all kinds. By that, I don’t necessarily mean substances, but we can include those. Even more interesting and harder to understand are the things that come with the dopamine rush of a certain way of thinking or way of speaking. And what we need to do is what we always need to do, which is to examine the desires that are in play.

I don’t think we can fully transcend our primate nature with philosophy or with civil dialogue. What we can do maybe is constrain it and channel it. As you say, we can have a productive distrust. I think that’s a good way to think about it — that distrust in itself might be satisfactory, might bind you to a group in a very cozy way, but what’s the bigger picture? What’s the longer-term idea or goal?

This is very difficult because it cuts to the heart of our nature as creatures who are not always rational. We have this capacity to think, and like I said, we can reflect on our actions as well as perform them, but to what degree do we actually control how we feel about things? At a certain point, this becomes a question for the therapist’s couch.