Talking to ... Wilfred Reilly

That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological
labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but
it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity
its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is
enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist
undertakes the task of comparing and contrasting morality trends
with the data and finds the results deeply troubling. As in the
case of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the data found
that incidents of brutal police violence were in the low
double-digit range, while the general public was convinced it was
an almost endemic behavior that’s been documented thousands of
times. Doesn’t this raise several difficult-to-explain questions
of cognitive dissonance? How are such contradictions even
possible in a society that considers itself enlightened? What
does this have to do with our present Attention Economy? How is
it possible that a culture of victimization develops in the
shadow of the moral economy? All of these questions are touched
upon in conversation with Wilfred Reilly.


Wilfred Reilly teaches political science at Kentucky State
University, and his books Hoax and Taboo are widely discussed in
the American public.


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