Claire Lehmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why hasn’t this evolved more? There’s a potential audience. If indeed it’s true women, on average, are more empathetic, you could make an argument, libertarianism is the true empathy. Women on the whole don’t seem to buy that argument. What exactly is stuck in the middle? Empathetic people can favor markets, right? Yeah. I think it comes back to communication. Any message can be communicated effectively if you take a narrative that perhaps has some kind of . . . There’s something like six narrative structures that are known to elicit emotional reactions in people, like the hero overcoming obstacles. That’s like the most basic narrative framework. If you want to present a political argument, you have to be able to put your argument into some kind of narrative structure that elicits an emotional reaction. I think libertarians have been because they’re very rationalist and systematizing, they’re skeptical of the utility of narratives and manipulating people’s emotions. How did at least some parts of American higher education get so screwed up in the first place? Structurally, what went wrong? Is it that campus life is somehow toxic? Is it the intersection of the university and some new technologies? What’s your take?…

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