Rory Sutherland

There's a kind of weird sensitivity signaling, which generally has nothing to do with the groups you are trying to protect, which is just it's sometimes called a purity spiral.

where you effectively signal your moral or political purity by signaling extraordinary heightened sensitivity to anything that might conceivably offend someone else, even if the group...

on whose behalf you claim to be campaigning, is completely unconcerned by it.

You have to really watch it.

And I've noticed this in certain people on the right.

Which is, I think it's fundamentally dangerous to invest too much of your own identity in a political standpoint to the point where I've seen it in people, both sides become effectively deranged.

Now, you could say that's the effect of the people who attack them and that the derangement wouldn't happen and wouldn't be necessary in a different kind of media environment.

I'm going to say, actually, that everybody always blames social media.

I would argue that the mainstream media, it is always in your interest, and this is a problem in journalism, it's always in your interest to provoke a fight because then you have something to cover.

Nobody's interested in reading about peace and harmony.

They're interested in reading about discord and argument and dispute.

By the way, that's an evolutionary tendency.

If we're sitting here and we heard a fight break out across the street, we'd be there with our noses pressed up against the glass.

If we heard people amicably discussing the weather, we wouldn't pay it the slightest attention.

We've fundamentally evolved to pay attention to conflict.

And so the only difference is the tools available to us?

And the extent to which social media provide the mainstream media...

I mean, in 1975, if you wanted to find someone who was outraged by the Sidney Sweeney advertisement, you'd actually have to do some legwork, wouldn't you?

Now, it's one search on X or, you know, blue sky or whatever it may be.

A willful misunderstanding is another thing that, you know, is another technique which is deployed.