I used to hate it when non-political people talked about politics, but now after being red-pilled, I welcome it. Political opinions serve as a sort of rationality test. If someone is blue-pilled and has "Trump Derangement Syndrome," they clearly aren’t thinking clearly about politics, and that makes me question their rationality and reasoning in other areas of life.
A perfect example is Sam Harris. I used to be a huge fan of his podcast and books, and leading up to the 2016 election I was in-line with him politically, seeing Trump as an existential threat. However, after the election, I had repeated red-pill moments (such as the Russia collusion conspiracy) which made me realize that, while Trump was not good, he was nowhere near as bad as Harris and others on the left thought.
Harris’s podcast, formerly my favorite, has become border-line unlistenable whenever he talks about politics, as he remains fully blue-pilled in regards to Trump. Again, I’m no fan of Trump, but to think he is a thousand times worse than Obama or any other president is preposterous. Harris’s main criticisms of Trump remain his demeanor and way of speaking—the things he says rather than the things he does. If Harris examined Trump fairly, he’d see that the things Trump actually did were not very different from Obama or any other president.
Harris, like all other Democrats, went full-in on the Russian conspiracy, but when that proved to be nothing, he offered no remorse. He didn’t reconsider his position on Trump and instead remained in full hysteria mode, viewing Trump as a unique existential threat despite no evidence to support such a claim. Of course, he uses the current coronavirus pandemic as evidence, but there’s nothing Trump did or didn’t do that would have been drastically different than a Democrat in charge (other than speaking more “presidential” during the press conferences). There is plenty to criticize Trump about, such as the increased government spending and wars in the Middle East, but Harris and the Democrats can’t criticize him about that because Obama did the same exact thing—even more so.
Harris blames Trump for the eroding of trust in our institutions and experts, but he fails to acknowledge the actual failures of our institutions and experts. They’ve done it to themselves and no longer deserve our trust. The Cathedral (the corporate press and universities) are even more delusional and irrational than Harris, yet he expects people to look to them for truth? It's comically hypocritical how Harris attacks people like Vox's Ezra Klein and others on the "far left," when they are merely taking his own philosophy of neoliberal progressivism to its logical conclusion.
Harris even devoted a podcast to talking about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (with another TDS patient), and it was hysterical to hear them “debunking” the idea that they have TDS while simultaneously displaying all the symptoms—such as: Sam “knowing for a fact exactly what Trump is thinking” and claiming “all Trump cares about is his ego and money” (despite the fact he was making more money and was more well-liked by the public before he entered politics). Claiming that Trump won the presidency based on "pure dumb luck" plus the "tribalism, ignorance, stupidity, and racism" of his voters. Sam openly admits that Joe Biden is a poor candidate and may be going senile but he “doesn’t care” and would vote for literally anyone over Trump. Sam bemoans identity politics yet he “knows for a fact that Trump is a racist” (because the journalists who call Sam a racist say Trump is a racist, but they’re wrong about Sam but right about Trump…?). Harris drowns in logical fallacies whenever talking about Trump.
Sam Harris, like so many otherwise intelligent people on the left, particularly scientists, openly admit they know little to nothing about economics, yet they continue to espouse opinions on politics relating to the economy—and all of politics is related to economics. He provides straw-man views of libertarianism and thinks the COVID-19 crisis proves that the free market cannot handle such a situation—that we need government to overcome this. Yet he fails to account for how the government is currently preventing the free market from addressing the pandemic because of red-tape and regulations, or how the decisions made by the "experts" in the WHO, CDC, and FDA made matters worse.
Sam Harris’s irrational and delusional views on politics and economics are supremely frustrating to listen to, and I wish he’d talk more about things he specializes in like neuroscience and the nature of consciousness. However, the fact that he fails the political rationality test so severely makes me question his rationality in other domains.
Could it be that artificial intelligence isn’t the existential threat he claimed it was? Are the robots really going to take all our jobs and make universal basic income a necessity? Whereas I used to agree with Sam, I now view AI more like Trump. Yes, it’s a threat, but not an existential one. The same for climate change and COVID-19 itself. They’re real and threats to humanity, but nowhere near as catastrophic as Harris and other alarmists believe. AI will replace many human jobs but create many more new ones. UBI is not the answer.
I was an agnostic before discovering Same Harris, but he convinced me atheism was the answer and religion was a cancer on society. I’ve since reconsidered his (and my) views on Islam and religion in general, and have moved more in the direction of Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein, viewing religion as, not literal truth but metaphorical truth, and an evolutionary adaptation. Islam is not the cause of terrorism in the Middle East—American interventionism is the cause of terrorism. There’s still plenty about Islam to criticize, such as its treatment of gays and women, but again, Harris misses the forest from the trees and makes religion seem worse than it is.
Finally, there is the issue of free will. I used to find his claim that humans don’t have free will a compelling argument, but now I realized his ideas about free will may have been just as misguided as his ideas on politics. He’s right to some degree, that no one chooses their genes or environment—humans certainly have less free will than most think—but within those parameters there exists some freedom.
I used to think Sam Harris was one of the smartest and most rational humans on the planet, but his narrow-minded and simplistic views on politics—Trump specifically—helped illuminate to me how narrow-minded and simplistic his other views are. Harris is just one example of many like him (or worse) throughout science and academia. If someone can be so biased, irrational, and delusional when thinking about one subject, it is unlikely that they are beacons of pure rationality in other domains. Therefore, it’s good that people reveal their political opinions publicly to help recognize their bias and separate the wheat from the chaff.
