There's a trend, always in humanity, to reject the prior consensus, usually involving ridicule, to show you are in the new, cutting-edge crowd. Ridicule is ridiculous itself, but the renewal is IMHO probably a good thing.

In the last (ten?) years it's seemed to be rejecting post-modernism (popular even on HN, where people seem to use post-modernism to reject itself) and then the Enlightenment itself, upon which freedom and democracy rely.

But rejection is just reactionaryism, it's just negative. What positive world does Sapolky envision? In what direction do they lead? (Don't tell me that there is no positive world, etc. - despair, part of the trendiness I suspect, is just lazy reactionaryism.)

Also, one must ask, who benefits? Some bad people - the dictators, the liars, the cults of personality, as far as I can see.

> This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We need to read the book to see if that's the journalist riffing or a claim of the book whose release is the impetus for the article.

He has been saying so for years. Here he is detailing it with Sam Harris in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9aAYJhQz3A

Who told him to say that?