We All Hallucinate Reality: Turi Munthe on Why We Think What We Think

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Yesterday, we had the eminent Washington, DC-based psychiatrist, Sally Satel on the show. She's also at the American Enterprise Institute. And she, one of the things we talked about was how people of different ages and political affinities thought about mental health. They imagined their own mental condition very differently, depending which side of the political aisle they were on. And this idea that even mental health is thought of relatively is actually supported by an interesting piece in the Financial Times last week about what's really going on in mental health. That left and right-leaning young people show different trends. They even imagine their condition quite differently, according both to political ideology and age group. In other words, what we think we think is a reflection, not so much of what we like to think, but perhaps we're somehow programmed by our politics and our age. That's certainly a theme of our conversation today. Turi Munthe is a British-based Anglo-Italian, French-based journalist, investor, thinker, writer. His new book out is Why We Think What We Think, The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs. He's joining us from Miami in Florida, of all places. Turi, congratulations on the new book. It's been very well received.

**Turi Munthe** (2:18)
Thanks for having me.

**Andrew Keen** (2:19)
In terms of this book, Turi, is it an extreme form of relativism that everyone thinks differently, that it reflects our political ideology, our age, our geography, our cultures, so that there really is no truth?

**Turi Munthe** (2:41)
Good to start with a bang, Andrew. Thank you for the question. Thanks for having me on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here and to connect with you.
I really think not.
I want to pick up with Isaiah Berlin, Anglo-Russian philosopher, long time at Oxford, who made the point very loudly that relativism and pluralism are not the same thing. I think that the point of my book here is to drive forward a very pluralist agenda, which reminds everybody how important it is to register the sincerity and value of opinions on all sides of the political, religious, ethical spectrum, because they are sincere, because they're natural, but it doesn't relativize truth. And there are a couple of things I want to unpack here. One is what my book looks at truly is opinions, beliefs, values, things which are not based in, which cannot be factually proven. So the way to think about this is that Charles Windsor, right now at least, is king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and defender of the faith, and God knows what other titles he's got. That is a statement of fact. Whether you like that state of affairs, whether you're a Republican or a monarchist is where opinion lies. And so what I'm not talking about is facts. What I'm talking about is, in this book, is I'm trying to unpack what the non-rational influences on our beliefs, values, and opinions are, what our predispositions are to think certain things.

**Andrew Keen** (4:30)
So let's go back to this issue of mental health. And what Sally Satel was talking about yesterday.
Why do people of different political persuasions and ages think differently about their own mental health? How does this fit into your narrative in your new book?

**Turi Munthe** (4:55)
So if we take generations, there are a bunch of different things which impact the fact that generations think differently. Look, we should also start with the fact that it's kind of a weird idea, right? That generations should think differently, that there should be generations, that we shouldn't all broadly function as humans depending on the kind of the fundamental biological nature of who we are. But generations are affected by a bunch of different things. One, major events, right? So the Second World War will have a major, major impact on the behaviors and attitudes of a particular generation, just with major economic shifts and turns. Technology has a massive impact. So people born before smartphones, people born before the Internet engage with the world in different ways. And these technologies impact our culture, just like they impact the ways we think. So that explains, I think, why different generations think differently about major issues.
As for left and right, one of the things that my book looks at is the very different, the very big differences between left and right almost at a, not almost, at a neurological level.
So what I am not trying to do is to play a kind of a Mengele game here and say, you know, that left and the right have got fully different brains and they function in completely different ways. But if you look at the margins, there are averages which are different. So people who tend to lean right-wing very slightly on the average, more readily surprised by loud noises. They are, they are sort of more attendant, neurologically more attendant to things like threat and danger. People who lean left tend on average to be, to have all those neurological dials wound down on some level. So at a neurological level, left and right are very slightly different political phenotypes. And those different phenotypes help explain a lot of the political attitudes and the policies that left and right support.