My Book Review of Pinker's Latest
I review "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" by Steven Pinker
From my book review in Taki’s Magazine of Steven Pinker’s latest:
Steve Sailer
October 22, 2025
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has been one of the English-speaking world’s leading public intellectuals for the past three decades. But rather than retire to full-time punditry, he’s continued to do psychological exploration, first at MIT and now Harvard. His thirteenth book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, expands upon his original research into the field of “common knowledge” (a term that would be more self-explanatory if it were called “mutual knowledge” or “shared awareness”).
For instance, it may be obvious to you that the emperor has no clothes, but are you totally sure that everybody else knows that too? What if they don’t?
Maybe, just to be sure, you’ll wait until somebody else shouts it out first?
Common knowledge seems straightforward until you start trying to think it through, and then you soon find yourself sounding like Vizzini recursively explaining to the Man in Black in The Princess Bride which glass of wine must be the poisoned one.
Pinker’s opening paragraph begins:
As a cognitive scientist, I have spent my life thinking about how people think. So the ultimate subject of my fascination would have to be how people think about what other people think, and how they think about what other people think they think, and how they think about what other people think they think they think.
And yet this devilishly abstract-sounding field has much contemporary relevance during the current vibe shift.
For example, the recent transgender mania among young people seems to be undergoing a preference falsification cascade straight out of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last speech on Dec. 21, 1989, when suddenly everybody in Romania, including Ceaușescu, realized that everybody else no longer feared but instead scorned this long dangerous but now ridiculous old man.
Read the whole thing at Taki’s.
I'm beginning to see arguments from commenters along the lines of, yes we know the WW2/#literallyHitler paradigm no longer fits and "classical liberalism" is riddled with unprincipled exceptions but STOP SPOILING THINGS! To which I respond, to paraphrase Will Ferrell, Steve Sailer and Roissy, how long do you think your throne of pretty little lies will stand?
I like the phrase "recursively explaining" and the mental picture of Vizzini talking himself down a rabbit hole. That's what I hear when economists start blabbing that ACKSHUALLY [points to line graph] filling your country up with Third World tax eaters is good for the economy! Then you ask them why Third World tax eaters can't seem to do any good for Third World economies, and they're off for another ten minutes of ACKSHUALLY!
It's also interesting how Hispanics show up in this reverse canary-in-the-coal-mine role: when the ambient socio-economics are healthy, Hispanics do good! When the ambient socio-economics are toxic, Hispanics deal drugs and kidnap each other. They are cultural followers and we should harness this.
I'm reminded of a documentary I watched on Guatemalan gangs. It was produced by a free-lancer who obviously wanted to show the grittiness and _oppression_ of life in paramilitarized Guatemala but the actual affect was kind of pathetic. Guatemala is basically a country of 14-year-olds with lots of ad hoc gang formation, and the more civic minded men form these ragtag neighborhood watches and ask for donations from their wealthier neighbors to keep them in ammo (and, I suspect, food and cerveza). Not pretty but it's cheaper than what the gangs charge and they don't kill you and rape your daughters if you don't pay. (By the way, where is the uber-compassionate Catholic Church in these messes in all her traditionally Catholic countries?)
What also struck me from this documentary was how low-tier the firearms were. The average suburban dad/iSteve reader easily outguns them. You could probably get a Marine battalion drunk and tell them go take over the place and they'd have it in a week.
In closing and without further elaboration, I think we are approaching the end of liberalism and the beginning of neo-colonialism. The alternative is the Global North becomes the Global South and the light of the world goes out.
It's nice that Steve's so complimentary about Pinker's IQ and such, but Pinker is really just an example of Orwell's dictum that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Pinker's warning that discussing race and IQ "might embolden racists, make it easy to overlook systemic racism, shake the confidence of individual African Americans, and further divide the country along racial lines" is not a reasoned evaluation of reality, it's merely a recitation of the Leftist Credo to let everyone know he is one of the 'good guys'.
As Steve and AnotherDad have shown item by item, Pinker is wrong about everything that matters. And worse, he's wrong about it in a clever-sounding way that further entrenches destructive policy.
Pinker has always been a clever doofus.
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