Host: Ken Bronstein

SUBJECT: WE WILL LISTEN TO WNYC’S BRIAN LEHRER INTERVIEW OF BROOKE GLADSTONE ABOUT HER NEW BOOK: The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time. 

HOW fake news, post-truth, and why reality itself has become a hotly contested issue of our time. 

A LIVELY DISCUSSION WILL FOLLOW

Brooke Gladstone, host and managing editor of WNYC’s On the Media and the author of The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman Publishing Company, 2017), talks about fake news, post-truth, and why reality itself has become a hotly contested issue of our time. 
“It isn’t like there are two bubbles in this country,” says Brooke. “I think there are as many bubbles as there are individuals. They are bespoke, hand crafted.”

The remedy for reality is not so simple. “Fact checking alone won’t stop Trump,” Brooke says, “We are wired to lie to ourselves to keep our worlds consistent.”

Reality. It used to seem so simple—reality just was, like the weather. Why question it, let alone disagree about it? And then came the assault, an unending stream of “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and lies disguised as truths that is overwhelming our notions of reality. Now we can’t even agree on what a fact is, let alone what is real. How on earth did we get here?
In 1985, critic and educator Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, the most incisive, impassioned warning label ever issued on our media diet. To illuminate the danger, he contrasts two pivotal works of dystopian fiction: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.

In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us …

Orwell, who in 1948 was fixed on Nazi devastation and Soviet ascendancy, seemed to have nailed it. But 37 years later, Postman saw that in our time and place, it’s unquestionably Huxley. He portrayed a world that leads ineluctably to the election of Donald Trump.

A $10 charge for this event is used to help cover the cost of the venue.