Wisdom of Crowds Shadi Hamid & Damir Marusic

This week’s episode is a special collaboration with The Disagreement, a new platform that aims to “celebrate and normalize healthy disagreement.” (Check them out!) Wisdom of Crowds is 100% behind that mission statement, and so it was natural for us to agree to record an episode together. Fans of Wisdom of Crowds will know that Shadi has recently completed a book about American power, tentatively titled, “On Power.” Fans will also know that he debated the socialist writer Dan Bessner of the podcast last summer, in our episode titled “Is a Better World Possible Without American Power?” A lot has happened since that episode air, especially in the Middle East. So it’s a good time for Shadi and Dan to consider that question again. Enjoy Hamid v. Bessner, Round 2.
Required Reading and Listening:
Hamid v. Bessner, Round 1: “Is a Better World Possible without American Power?” (Wisdom of Crowds)
Shadi’s recent post about completing his manuscript: “The Art of Losing Well” (Wisdom of Crowds).
The Disagreement homepage.



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Christine and Damir kick things off by discussing a memoir about the fall of Communism in Albania. Damir reflects on his own post-Communist background, and ponders why Communist nostalgia affects only some countries, while others are not looking back. He wonders whether Christine is becoming a Communist herself after reading her essay about “Limitarianism,” a school of political thought that favors a cap on extreme wealth. Christine unpacks her own ideas about economic justice and democracy, and considers whether the Communist past in Europe should influence American political ideas for the future.
For paid subscribers, the bonus part of the episode focuses on whether the United States or Europe has the better economic system, and whether European dreams of a “green” economy can survive competition with China.
Required Reading:
* Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi.
* The full story behind Joyce Carol Oates’ infamous tweet.
* Damir’s Monday Note about Lea Ypi’s book.
* Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns
* “What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?” by Christine Emba (The Atlantic)
* “The Price of Peace is Stagnation” by Janan Ganesh (The Financial Times)

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This week’s podcast is a recording of a live event. Rachel M. Cohen, a senior policy reporter for Vox, recently published an essay where she asks: “To our generation, being a mom looks thankless, exhausting, and lonely. Can we change the story?” As listeners know, this question speaks right to the heart of Wisdom of Crowds. Christine and Shadi invited Rachel to discuss her piece before a live audience in Washington, DC on March 20. The topics of conversation included marriage, singleness, hope, dread, and love. For paid subscribers, the bonus content is an intense Q&A with the audience, where the Crowd challenges the panelists on several points.
Required Reading:
* “Why Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood,” by Rachel M. Cohen (Vox).
* “Men are Lost. Here’s a Map Out of the Wilderness,” by Christine Emba (Washington Post).
* Shadi Hamid, “The Dilemmas of Living in a Post-Religious World” (Washington Post).

America is badly polarized. It’s a fact so pervasively acknowledged that pointing it out starts to feel like saying the sky is blue. Unlike a blue sky, however, growing polarization in America presents a difficult challenge. Because America is both incredibly diverse and a vibrant democracy, polarization starts to eat away at our politics.
Many attempts have been made to deal with polarization. A lot of it has to do with putting people with diverging perspectives face-to-face in an attempt to try to find common ground. Here at Wisdom of Crowds, we have tackled the problem by taking only half of this approach: we insist that people in disagreement confront each other, but with no expectation of common ground emerging.
We frequently talk about “deep difference.” We believe it’s naive to think that through reasoned discourse we can reach compromise positions. That does violence to the power of ideas and the strength of belief. We think it’s both healthier and more realistic to acknowledge that certain differences can’t be reconciled, and to instead direct the conversation toward respectful mutual interrogation — where the discussants push each other to excavate why they believe what they believe.
Jen Murtazashvili is one person who is profoundly aligned with what we’re doing. She first came on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast in August of 2021 to talk about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. But both Shadi and Damir had gotten to know her almost a year earlier, during the start of COVID, when she kindly invited them both to participate in an online seminar about modus vivendi liberalism. Jen’s extensive work on Afghanistan had given her cause to be suspicious of top-down thinking that nation-building requires. She understands that societies are built from the bottom-up, from local insights, from particularism. Difference can’t be papered over.
We have been planning to collaborate more with Jen’s Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh for some time. Today, we’re pleased to announce that collaboration is kicking off. In the coming months, you will see podcast episodes and essays that will carry the CGM logo, featuring guests and writers and thinkers that the three of us have decided we need to engage with. First principles and the spirit of modus vivendi will animate all of it.
To launch the collaboration, we wanted to have Jen on the podcast. We didn’t explicitly set out to model exactly what we hope to achieve with the collaboration. But with the Gaza War in the background, it was impossible that we wouldn’t get to discussing it. As you’ll hear below, the conversation is deeply felt and argued — and remains unresolved. That’s as it should be.
(The paywall is down on this one, so everyone can give it a listen.)
We walked away from it energized to do more. We hope, dear listeners, you feel the same way. And you join us as we continue our Governing Deep Differences project.
Required Reading (and Listening):
* “Community Before Politics,” by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili (Discourse Magazine).
* “Two Friends — One Jewish, One Muslim — Have an Answer to Campus Conflict, by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Abdesalam Soudi (Tablet).
* “All Aboard the Compassion Bus — with Jen Murtazashvili,” on Ask a Jew Podcast (Apple).
* A tweet by Senator Fetterman (X).
* “The U.S. has more in common with South America than Europe,” by Samuel Goldman (The Week).
* “Hamas’ Bid for Revolutionary Legitimacy,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).


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Editor’s note: We haven’t done an episode quite like this before. I absolutely loved this conversation with the novelist Jordan Castro, one of the most exciting young American authors writing today. Because it was such a rich conversation, we’re leaving out the paywall so that everyone can have a listen.
—Shadi Hamid, co-founder, Wisdom of Crowds
What’s it actually like to be a novelist? And how does literary success—and some amount of fame and notoriety—change how people think of you?
Special guest Jordan Castro joins Shadi and Santiago to talk about his novel, The Novelist, internet culture, converting to Christianity, his heroin addiction, love and, of course, literature.
At nearly two hours it’s a rich and, dare we say it, epic chat on the stuff of life. If you’ve ever wanted to get in the brain of a writer, you won’t want to miss this. Really.
Required Reading:
* The Novelist by Jordan Castro
* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on René Girard
* New anthology of Girard’s essential writings
* Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
* The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion by Søren Kierkegaard
* Dante: “I found myself within a forest dark …”
* Plato’s Myth of the Cave in the Republic
* Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
* The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa
* Maxime du Camp
* Substance Abuse National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)




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In a late-night confab, Damir and Sam explore the meaning of experiences of wonder, which they each have written about for Wisdom of Crowds.
For Sam, these unique experiences are the foundation for his beliefs about the nature of the world and human life. Damir, on the other hand, does not believe that the experience of wonder necessarily leads to metaphysical questions. This freewheeling, stay-up-all-night fever dream of a conversation covers the pitfalls of therapy, the science of happiness, and lots of ancient Greek literature.
Required Reading:
* Damir’s piece, “A Lost Sense of Wonder,” Wisdom of Crowds
* Sam’s piece, “Desire, Sadness, and the World,” Wisdom of Crowds
* Oliver Traldi, “Do You Know What You Want?”, Wisdom of Crowds
* Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
* Parmenides’ fragments