Dan Carlin has spent decades explaining history’s collapses. Now he’s watching one happen in real time. In conversation with Kmele Foster, Carlin unpacks the state of societal collapse, the erosion of our nation’s shared truth, and the sharp comparison between the 80’s’ Xeroxed flyers on windshields and the present day flooding of information.
He explains why the Constitution was designed to prevent tyranny, not efficiency, how that tradeoff is finally being tested, and why Congress’s refusal to declare war for decades has altered the rules of executive power.
About the speaker: Veteran journalist Dan Carlin’s Generation X, non-partisan, “neo-prudentist” outlook provides a fresh look at the headlines in the newspapers and the stories in the history books. His two podcasts, “Hardcore History” and “Common Sense” are two of the leading independent podcasts in their respective genres. Both productions feature Carlin’s unique, contradictory broadcast style.
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Timestamps
00:00:00 10,000 realities, zero shared facts
00:02:35 Today’s chaos was seeded 50 years ago
00:06:17 How the internet killed the gatekeepers
00:08:45 Bury the truth in a pile of garbage
00:12:05 Can society build an immune system for lies?
00:17:48 Congress chose to go powerless
00:31:15 Trump dropped the pretending
00:39:15 Every movement creates its own backlash
01:11:42 Stop calling AI a product when it’s a weapon
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
In the old days when you used to say around the water cooler that the “New York Times says blank,” the New York Times might have been lying to us that that might have been propaganda. But was it better to have a shared view of truth even if it was false than to have 50 truths and you can’t even have a conversation now? Right? This is like having 10,000 reality choices where we are now. It’s like pick your reality.
10,000 realities, zero shared facts
[Kmele Foster] I’m Kmele Foster with Big Think and I am delighted to be here in conversation with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame, Common Sense. I think of you as a historian, Dan, but also a kind of public intellectual. I’m not sure which of those terms you more prefer or if perhaps you have some other way of describing what it is that you do.
[Dan Carlin] They both sound wrong. A historian is absolutely wrong. So public intellectual is amorphous enough, so we can have fun with it. But just your local neighborhood friendly podcaster. What the Spider-Man guy say?
[Foster] At the present moment the sensibility that a lot of people have is that something is askew. There is intense political division. There is a high even at the moment despite the fact that most Americans it seems are beginning to identify as independents, it still feels like there’s just a sharp political divide within the country. We’ve had a number of contentious elections recently.
We’ve had the results of those elections questioned persistently on perhaps both sides of the political spectrum. But I think most prominently after the the 2020 race, we still have lingering questions related to that in some people’s minds. And at the moment the notion of guardrails, constitutional protections and safeguards, norms even, all of those things seem to be in jeopardy in important respects.
We have various cases that are testing the authority of the courts. We have many people who are interested in reforms that would forever, not forever but would certainly meaningfully change the composition of the courts and their roles. Is that what we’re talking about when we say here that all of these things feel almost not so much up for grabs but at least much more fluid than they have at any other point in my lifetime.
Today’s chaos was seeded 50 years ago
[Carlin] I think I think where we kind of get into trouble with some of these things is we’re looking for, and I think it’s the way we divide history books too where you have chapters, right? So something happens and we realize, oh, we’ve entered into a new era where I feel like there’s much more of a continuum. Like I’ll go listen to some of the the punk albums I used to listen to when I was 14 years old. You’ll listen to the dead Kennedys and the lead singer Jello Offers talking about the stuff we’re doing in Central America and all these and stuff that this is all pre- internet, pre-digital, all this kind of stuff. But he’s talking about things that morphed into the now, right? And that’s when you realize how long some of these trends have been germinating. That’s maybe a good way to put it.
I would suggest that what we have now is the logical, and I say end result, but being a continuum, we’re not at the end, right? We’re we’re getting farther down the road. This is all stuff that to me we were talking about and this this gets to what you were saying earlier in an amorphous sense, right? That that we’re on our way to something. I’m not going to talk about what to do once we get there because I don’t know what it’s going to look like when we get there. But I feel like we’ve been on this path for a long time.
I could suggest that if we zoom out even farther when we know the story 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I think we’re going to be able to trace back the roots of now to 30, 40, 50 years ago. And that’s always the problem, I think, when we as human beings living in the story try to figure out what’s going on is that so much of what’s going on started before we got here.
It’s like the old Marx line that you don’t get to make history the way you want. to inherit a world that was created by other people and that has constraints that those other people were dealing with and then we add new elements, right? It’s their world from 1960 plus the internet plus this plus that plus changing moral values plus, you know, and add a bunch of different things. So I mean I feel like we’re just in a more intense version of where we were when I was 14 years old.
But those intense elements that have been added the internet, social media, all these kinds of things, they keep dialing up the amplitude. So everything we were dealing with, for example, politically or what they used to talk about the 1980s and the 1990s is trying to figure out a soft landing from the US post-war dominance, right? The hegemony that because we were the one power that wasn’t devastated… I mean, there was a a sugar high, a historical sugar high that we had after the 1945 that inevitably was going to come down as the rest of the world caught up. But what was that going to look like for the average American right on the street?
So, I remember in the 1980s when we’re dealing with Japan starting to make cars that were in getting into… this was all a very big deal, but you don’t see that as part of the larger picture, which is the coming off of the sugar high, the rest of the world catching up, and then you throw in these elements that have never existed before. I keep bringing up the internet because to me that’s the big X in our in our equation, right? The part that didn’t exist previously because otherwise as a history nut I’m going to attach this to similar circumstances in the past. But that’s the element that didn’t exist before. And that to me is the wild card. And when we watch our kids starting to attach themselves to a computer at the hip at 10 or 11 or 12 years old, I think it’s reasonable to ask what does that do to them? And then collectively, what does it do to society?
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