Truth Crisis: The Deliberate Collapse of Shared Reality with Philosopher James Madden

About this episode

Kelly Chase interviews philosopher James Madden about the collapse of shared reality and the implications of mistrust in institutions.

Something has shifted dramatically in the last few years. The institutions and information structures we were trained to trust have failed in ways that are now difficult to ignore, producing a kind of generalized mistrust that makes it hard to think, hard to act, and hard to know what a good life even looks like anymore. In this episode, Kelly sits down with philosopher and author James Madden to examine what it means to navigate belief and meaning when the ground beneath shared reality has already given way. Jim is the author of Unidentified Flying Hyper-Object: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World and Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism, the cohost of The Great Dangerous Books Podcast, and a longtime thinking partner whose refusal to offer easy answers has made him a favorite among listeners of Kelly's previous work. They talk about the complacent indifference that has settled over people in the wake of seemingly endless waves of institutional scandal and revelation. They talk about conspiracy thinking as a cognitive response to the collapse of trusted authority—and why the fact that some conspiracies turn out to be real makes the…

People in this episode

Host: Kelly Chase

Guest: James Madden

Topics covered

• shared reality
• institutional trust
• conspiracy thinking
• epistemic mistrust
• meaning and belief
• navigating information

Keywords

• trust
• belief
• conspiracy
• information
• philosophy
• mistrust
• meaning

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Great Dangerous Books Podcast

Books & works: Unidentified Flying Hyper-Object: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World, Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism

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