Over the last decade, the internet has devolved into a playground for influencers who peddle anything and everything you could imagine. But Helen Lewis says it isn’t just superficial TikTok stars telling you how to properly contour your face so you look like a Kardashian. She argues that the World Wide Web has became a digital revival tent, full of new leaders promising all kinds of enlightenment.
In fact, she says, we’re living in a golden age of gurus.
Helen Lewis is a writer for The Atlantic and host of the new BBC podcast, The New Gurus, which explores the “spiritual” leaders of the twenty-first century who have completely overtaken cyberspace. She profiles productivity hackers, dating coaches, wellness influencers, crypto bros, diversity experts, and heterodox intellectual heroes—who all make a living by captivating millions with their unconventional ideas (like drinking your own urine to get healthy or paying $5,000 to go to a dinner where you’ll be told you’re a racist).
Helen explains why these figures are so appealing right now, how our current moment stokes a belief in the most outlandish ideas, the limits of individual experts, and what, if anything, she’s learned about fighting our worst instincts, which are so easily amplified and indulged by the internet.
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I have listened to about two thirds of the podcast, then I stopped. The reason I stopped was my dissatisfaction witth the way in whci Helen Lewis sort of mixed all kinds of things that should really be more differentiated. In the discussion of the socalled IDW, names were thrown around (also by Bari Weiss, but in particular by Helen Lewis) that should really be distinguished and better differentiated.
For instance, why talk about Ibrahim Kendi in such positive tones and then ruthlessly disqualify other names such as Brett Weinstein or Jordan Peterson. This is a political judgement that does not say its name.
Critical Race Theory deserves as much a critical treatment than for instance some of the utterings of Joe Rogan, or some of Jordan Peterson's thoughts. But giving one some sort of special treatment is granting him a statute that just is not justified: Kendi's re-edition of marxist theory based on race (white people and their privilege replacing the bourgeoisie, and white privilege being equivalent to bourgois privilege, and black people becoming the new proletariat that has to be made classconscious and conscious of it being exploited by white supremacy) is really not an original and indeed a very poor rudimentary theory that does not withstand any serious scrutiny.
Listening to Helen Lewis, one could have thought that Kendi was a deep and thoughtful (her terms) thinker, which obviously he is not. He might be calm, but in reality he is a Marxist agitator. In that sense he might even be considered more of a guru than Joe Rogan while Helen Lewis even had us understand that she did not really consider him to be a guru because of his quiet thoughtful manner (she was even forgiving for his "seemingly and falsly "humanist explanation for the price he accepts to be paid for his conferences within corporations) whereas all the members of the IDW were talked about as mere gurus, with no intellectual interest. That might be justified for Dave Rubin or maybe Joe Rogan, but not for Jordan Peterson whose thoughts are at least as deep, if not more profound, than Kendi's.
So all in all, I thought this conversation (or the two thirds I listened to, covered too much ground, too many subjects and in some instances provided a very biased political perspective.
I would say we are living in a golden age of stupid.