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…the elites that ran our institutions had the authority to provide information, frame it & explain the world. That’s completely gone, and with it there’s been a bleeding away of expert authority, and a public has been created that’s essentially very angry…

Martin Gurri

Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What’s the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?

Martin Gurri spent decades as a CIA analyst and in his 2014 book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, predicted political turbulence for an entirely different reason: new communication technologies were flipping the balance of power between the public and traditional authorities.

In 1959 the President could control the narrative by leaning on his friends at four TV stations, who felt it was proper to present the nation’s leader in a positive light, no matter their flaws. Today, it’s impossible to prevent someone from broadcasting any grievance online, whether it’s a contrarian insight or an insane conspiracy theory.

According to Gurri, trust in society’s institutions – police, journalists, scientists and more – has been undermined by constant criticism from outsiders, and exposed to a cacophony of conflicting opinions on every issue the public takes fewer truths for granted. We are now free to see our leaders as the flawed human beings they always have been, and are not amused.

Suspicious they are being betrayed by elites, the public can also use technology to coordinate spontaneously and express its anger. Keen to ‘throw the bastards out’ – protesters take to the streets, united by what they don’t like, but without a shared agenda for how to move forward or the institutional infrastructure to figure out how to fix things. Some popular movements have come to view any attempt to exercise power over others as suspect.

If Gurri is to be believed, protest movements in Egypt, Spain, Greece and Israel in 2011 followed this script, while Brexit, Trump and the French yellow vests movement subsequently vindicated his theory.

In this model, politics won’t return to its old equilibrium any time soon. The leaders of tomorrow will need a new message and style if they hope to maintain any legitimacy in this less hierarchical world. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of grinding conflict between traditional centres of authority and the general public, who doubt both their loyalty and competence.

But how much should we believe this theory? Why do Canada and Australia remain pools of calm in the storm? Aren’t some malcontents quite concrete in their demands? And are protest movements actually more common (or more nihilistic) than they were decades ago?

In today’s episode we ask these questions and add an hour-long discussion with two of Rob’s colleagues – Keiran Harris and Michelle Hutchinson – to further explore the ideas in the book.

The conversation covers:

  • What’s changed about the public’s relationship to information and authority?
  • Are protesters today usually united for or against something?
  • What sorts of people are participating in these new movements?
  • Are we elites or the public?
  • Is the number of street protests and the level of dissatisfaction with governments actually higher than before?
  • How do we know that the internet is driving this rather than some other phenomenon?
  • How do technological changes enable social and political change?
  • The historical role of television
  • Are people also more disillusioned now with sports heroes and actors?
  • What are the best arguments against this thesis?
  • How should we think about countries like Canada, Australia, Spain, and China using this model?
  • Has public opinion shifted as much as it seems?
  • How can we get to a point where people view the system and politicians as legitimate and respectable, given the competitive pressures against being honest about the limits of your power and knowledge?
  • Which countries are finding good ways to make politics work in this new era?
  • What are the implications for the threat of totalitarianism?
  • What is this is going to do to international relations? Will it make it harder for countries to cooperate and avoid conflict?

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

If you want to unify a movement like for example the Yellow Vests in Europe or the anti-Mubarak movement in Egypt or the Indignados in Spain or the Occupiers here in the U.S., they were people from very different backgrounds, they were people from very different ideologies. They unified against. The more against you could be and the more you could build on that negation, the more powerful these movements became. The problem with that of course is at some point you need a positive program.

Before, to put a crowd on the streets, you needed an organization, you needed a plan, you needed printing presses to have little handouts, a mimeograph machine. 1968, anti-war. It was a very deeply organized thing. Today you all meet on Facebook. Nobody knows you’re there. These are mainly, in France for example, these are closed Facebook groups. You need to be able to ask to get in there. At a certain moment, they say, “Let’s go on the street.” Suddenly, out of nowhere comes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people angry and burning cars and vandalizing banks.

I think what’s needed and I think people who are just now starting on their career have a chance to do it if they want to adapt our institutions, to the actual world we’re living in, is learn to talk in a language that can’t be falsified almost immediately. Learn to talk in careful terms of we think we can do this or we hope we can do this. We can try this or then we can try that. This is all very unglamorous. Very unglamorous.

If you can say, “My gosh, I’ve got the ultimate solution or I’m so against you that I’m going to lead the demonstration of a million people and I’m going to eliminate this tax or whatever,” that’s a lot more glamorous. That’s not what we need. That’s happening right now, and in the end, it leads to a dead end. It leads to nihilism.

Estonia has digitized their politics and their public life to a pretty astounding degree. For example, every Estonian citizen owns his own public information. Part of what drives people crazy, whatever institution you go to, they ask you the same questions over and over again. You give all of this information, and they keep their set and the next institution will be different. If it’s state or if it’s local or if it’s government or it’s this side of the government or that side of the government, you have to be put through this “Who are you and why should I care” process.

In Estonia, you have one set of information. You can do any number of things including voting online, and it’s a country of about a million people. You could probably do that, and I live in Fairfax County, Virginia and that’s got a population of about 1.2 million. You could probably do that in Fairfax County, Virginia. Whether Virginia itself could do it is a question, the United States… I’ve sat in the bureaucracy of the United States government. You have no idea how the digital structure is alien to it. It just doesn’t know what to do with it…

Start small. Start at the local level, maybe the state level for some of the smaller states. You can get closer to that social and commercial reality and your political reality, and I think Estonia has done that to some degree.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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