The New Yorker:

In “Open Socrates,” the philosopher Agnes Callard reminds us how thinking should feel.

By Joshua Rothman

Every few months, out of curiosity, I red-pill myself. Usually, I start with YouTube. The algorithm is extraordinarily responsive: give a couple of videos a thumbs-up, and your whole feed swerves in a new ideological direction. My political default is center-left, and so the move is to shift it rightward. There’s Ben Shapiro debating a bunch of college students; there’s Charlie Kirk doing the same. Here’s Elon Muskturning the tables on Don Lemon. A random tough guy is talking to Shawn Ryan about home defense, and a badass mom is excoriating a school board for something or other—I’m not sure what’s at stake, but it’s satisfying to watch.

Those are just the quick hits, of course; to get the full effect, you have to move past the merely provocative toward what’s genuinely interesting. Watch some episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” but don’t skip Lex Fridman and Dwarkesh Patel; subscribe to ReasonTV, and listen to some interviews on “Conversations with Tyler.” Find some veterans talking about their experiences during Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. By this point, your feed will have expanded beyond politics, and red-pilling will have given way to a broad contrarianism—a sense that it’s exciting to rethink your views. People can be contrarian about all sorts of things—fitness, money, history, parenting, the meaning of life—and not all of it is crazy. You might order some books with which you could profoundly disagree (Patrick J. Deneen’s “Regime Change,” or Abigail Shrier’s “Bad Therapy”) and subscribe to some Substacks. There’s a place behind the building where the left and right meet; from there, the country doesn’t seem divided so much as scrambled up.

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