posverdad facts The Problem With Authority in the Modern Age

The Problem With Authority in the Modern Age

Something that concerns me greatly about the times we live in is how people are unable to discern fact from fiction. In the past, we’ve trusted our institutions to produce figures who can be trusted as authorities; and we outsourced a portion of our thought to those trusted authorities, whether they were the movie buff in our local friend group who we trusted to know which movies were good, or the newsman on TV who we trusted to give it to us straight and keep us informed.

Now we know that no singular authority exists on almost any topic. The news is a constellation of biased reports, to the point of being almost a choose-your-own-adventure reality. Cultural canons for Film/TV, Literature, Music, etc., have exploded; there is a “choose-your-own-adventure” aspect to that as well; whose list will you take, for instance, for cinema? Oscar winners? The IMDB Top 100? Or maybe some random list on ranker is more to your taste; whatever you select, it will be another subjective interpretation of what exists.

Even in academia, the canon has exploded, as post-modernist interpretations cycle new authors and poets into the curricula and old ones out.

So what’s going on here? The answer is that our trustees are determined, no longer by institutions, but by tribal cliques. Your political affiliation determines which news is appropriate to watch. Your identity affiliation determines your artistic canon. And success within the context of a clique determines authority.

We see celebrities use their platform to support political causes, for instance, or to promote products. People trust them, and follow the trends that they set, whether they have any actual expertise on these topics or products or not. If Kim Kardashian wanted to say, become a public authority on mathematics or law, she could easily do that; the amount of people who would take her conclusions at face value and spread them uncritically is at such a critical mass that if she said 2+2=6, she could easily make that true for a sizable amount of people.

And so it presents a dilemma for problem solving, in a time where we face great challenges — no one wants to solve a problem, because ‘truth’ is determined by trustee relationships with representatives of tribal groups who are competing. Objective truth is not the goal; objective truth is a problem that gets in the way of the competition between tribes.

If one popular figure said 2+2=6 and another said 2+2=10, and you, without tribal affiliation said that 2+2=4, you would be wrong. You would be mocked and laughed at. Having the right answer is worth little in modern society.

So if you have the right answer, you’re faced with a real conundrum — how to you accrue the authority necessary to have other people accept it? You could get authority from academia; completely useless, academic language is couched in jargon that intentionally makes it palatable only to other academics. Not only that, we now understand that academics is subservient to greater cultural trends. They sell admissions. They accept famous students for the publicity. They endorse political parties. The world will still believe 2+2=6 and all you will have achieved is banding together with some small group of people who also believe in the same answer; then you need some kind of ambassador from academia to sell its ideas to the rest of the population, a sort of Neil deGrasse Tyson type.

What if you achieve authority independently? You join up with one of the existing tribes, the beauty tribe, or the consumerist tribe, or a corporate umbrella, or a political party, and you become the tribal trustee of information among that tribe? You then have to play the bloodsport of advancing through the ladder of the tribe, which is competitive, and which many people are trying to do. If you’re doing this disingenuously, for an ulterior motive of gaining the authority to spread correct information, you will not succeed.

Let’s take a look at how ideas get disseminated. Typically, very, very smart people come up with ideas. These people are often rebellious iconoclasts. When these ideas begin to pick up steam, academic institutions co-opt them and pretend they were on board with the ideas to begin with, because they have a vested interest in maintaining the image that the cutting edge of human thought is generated by them.

The smartest people in the institutions implement some sort of peer review and cement the idea into something dissectable and teachable. Then, these people teach the idea to the next rung down on the ladder, and those students, most of whom are not set to join academia, go out into the world. They become business owners, media personalities, etc., and use the institutional structure that they inherit to spread the ideas they were taught by the academics. The distributors popularize the ideas in media and business, and then other, tertiary, groups.

Each of these groups has a ‘smartest person in the room’ who has a vested interest in maintaining that hierarchical status, and that person will stay up to date with literature and the other forms of disseminated media and further disseminate it, often scratching out someone else’s name and writing theirs on it in order to maintain credit.

This pattern continues, so on and so forth, and at each rung the ‘smartest person’ has a slightly lower IQ than the ‘smartest person’ from the previous rung, and the idea is slightly reduced in complexity and increased in sensationalism until, like a game of telephone, it reaches the lowest levels of society as a ridiculously simple, repeatable slogan, or as a very obvious theme in a children’s movie.

So if you can’t get authority from one of the major tribes, what has to be done? You have to inject yourself somewhere along this equation and start the spread, co-opting the tribes and forcing their hand to adopt or lose reputation. Ultimately there is no surefire way, but the point is this:

It is not enough to be correct. There is always a political game to be played. Correctness, at least in modern times, is a social feat. It has nothing to do with correctness and everything to do with achieving authority, whether that’s by winning a debate (which has everything to do with aggression, comfort with conflict and verbal acuity, and nothing to do with correctness), or raising a lot of money (which has everything to do with connections, charisma and manipulation of the capitalist machine and nothing to do with correctness), etc. Correctness, currently, has to be implemented by power, like everything else in modern society.

This is a huge problem. The reason it’s like this is because the average citizen lacks the time, energy, critical thinking ability, independence of thought and broad knowledge necessary to discern correctness from incorrectness for themselves and, as a result, need a broad network of trustees almost all of whom are fundamentally untrustworthy because they’re motivated by status, hierarchy and external validation, not correctness. So the real problem is education, to reduce the need for these trustees who abuse their power in the same way 14th and 15th century trustees appointed by the church abused their power to sell indulgences.

Look for the people who are obviously intelligent, who are saying things that intuitively sound true, who powerful people ignore or label crazy and, and this is key who sacrifice to share their ideas, not gain. Those are the iconoclasts. You will be reading their ideas in two generations in a textbook written by someone who disingenuously ignored or rejected those ideas and then stole them, penned them and wrote their name on it.

That’s who I’d trust anyway. Not someone based on their fame, wealth or institutional endorsement. We know very well those things most often translate to corruption and manipulation, not truth.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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