The Parlia Podcast: On Opinion

The world is awash with opinions, and we’re awash with them too - they are at the core of how we define ourselves. But do we understand what opinions actually are?

The Parlia Podcast asks:

What is an opinion?
Where do they come from?
And what does that mean for politics and society?

These aren’t idle academic questions today.

We are at our most polarised in a generation. Brexit split Britain, Trump split America, and COVID-19 has accelerated those same fractures across the world.

As we face the massive challenges of today - Climate Change, the shift of global power away from the West, the surge of populism all over the world - when we are at our most divided and most angry - now is precisely the time to ask: why do we think what we think? how can we learn to listen to opinions that we hate, so that we can tackle our difficulties together.

In the Parlia Podcast, we’ll be talking to experts from around the world and across the political spectrum.

Over the episodes that follow, we’ll be tackling everything from the logic of conspiracy theories, through how crowds think, the psychology of empathy, the universal premises of morality, how history can be divided up into ‘emotional epochs’, and how technology has changed how we actually feel.

We hope you’ll join us as we unpack what it is that we think, and why.