I have no interest in professional sports, much less boxing, much less the life and times of Mike Tyson. So I have nothing of substance to say about his recent bout with Jake Paul or much of anything else about him, but I was stopped short by a sleeper of a Mike Tyson story, his interview with Jazlyn “Jazzy” Guerra, a thirteen-year-old online journalist (scroll all the way down for it).

The interview ranges over a bunch of biographical topics, only a small portion of which has attracted mass media attention. Around the middle of the interview, Guerra asks Tyson about what he takes his “legacy” to be. Tyson responds by questioning the premise behind the question: he’s indifferent to his legacy because he doesn’t regard posthumous “legacy” as a legitimate consideration or concept. Guerra lets him say his piece, thoughtfully muses over it, offers some appreciation for his candor, and praises him for the originality of his thought.

This little swatch of conversation strikes me as more newsworthy than anything you’ll find written about the Tyson-Paul fight, 99% of what’s on the sports pages, or half of the things regarded as newsworthy by our opinion-makers and “influencers.” When was the last time you saw an interview about anything in our mass media in which the interviewer asks a question, the interviewee rejects the assumptions behind it, and the interviewer lets him do so without interruption?

Turn on any “talk show,” and you’ll find exactly the opposite procedure at work. Somebody asks a loaded question, and expects an answer responsive to it precisely as stated. The interviewee either answers the question in such a way as to affirm the assumptions embedded in it, or tries to question those assumptions. In the latter case, the interviewee is either interrupted into silence or shut down. Then we move to the next question, repeating the same process. Repeat this a hundred-plus times a day, maybe a thousand times a week, maybe 50,000 times a year, maybe half a million times a decade. That’s what mass media talk news is–canned answers to loaded questions, repeated over and over to indoctrinate the public in the dogmas of the moment, or else the perpetual dogmas of our ruling class.

Now try to imagine some version of the Jazzy Guerra Method applied to something of greater importance than Mike Tyson. What would it look like? The topic is, let’s say, American foreign policy. A question arises about the particulars of some position taken by, say, the Biden Administration on foreign policy. The interviewee rejects the premise of the question and in doing so, raises some broader questions about the nature of foreign policy as such–or about self-defense, deterrence, genocide, or proxy war. The interviewer refrains from interrupting him and refrains from reminding him, every three seconds, that he’s only got five seconds left to speak. Taboo subjects arise but are discussed without constantly reminding the audience that a taboo subject is currently being discussed, and without telling them in advance what they should think about it. The interviewee’s views are not dismissed in advance as unworthy of consideration after describing who he is and what he’s presumed to stand for.

This probably sounds like some inconceivable discursive utopia, but it isn’t. It’s how real people carry on normal conversations about contentious subjects. We seem to have forgotten this obvious truth under the influence of well-heeled but totally unhinged people imposing conversational styles on us that no normal person would ever adopt. But try to tell them that, and see how far you get. These are people who not only can’t handle the truth, but can’t abide the thought of anyone else doing so. Their job is to shut dissidents up before anyone has any idea what they’re saying. 

In a more normal world, no one would take for granted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine entails a threat to the United States that justifies an indefinite proxy war, or that Israel is entitled to commit a genocide with our help to defend itself against the people it’s been militarily occupying for decades, or that the existence of migrant gangs in the US requires a shut-down of the Mexican border (or an invasion of Mexico), or that it’s no big deal that we’ve effectively outsourced our Haiti problem to a bunch of Kenyan mercenaries, or that an imminent war with Iran, or anticipated war with China, are all foregone inevitabilities inviting resignation rather than resistance.

Yet most Americans take all or most of these psychopathic propositions for granted, every one of them dogmas that have become reigning wisdom only by dint of constant repetition by supposedly authoritative experts. Under a discursive regime like this, we have no need for formal censorship. All we need is a monopolistic mass media machine, the eager acquiescence of the people who consume what it puts on offer, and the pusillanimity of those who know better. The result is a silence that speaks volumes in indictments, complicity, and guilt.

“Naïveté,” as Goethe put it, “is the most important attribute of genius.” That’s the secret of Jazzy Guerra’s success, a success that exceeds anything you’ll see on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, or the average high- to middle-brow podcast. It takes naïveté to ask a real question, to wait in suspense for the answer, and to take it in without cutting it off before you’ve grasped what the speaker is saying. That may not look like the usual idea of “genius,” but it stands head and shoulders over the dogmatism and mediocrity that dominate our political discourse. Maybe our hyper-sophisticates should give it a try. They might find it more of a challenge than they can manage.