by Hugo Mercier
ination to make sense of the master’s pronouncements. At this
stage, the vagueness of the concepts becomes a strength, giving
Lacan’s groupies leeway to interpret his ideas in myriad ways, to
read into the concepts much more than was ever intended. As
noted by two of his detractors, “Lacan’s writings became, over
time, increasingly cryptic . . . by combining plays on words with
fractured syntax; and they served as a basis for the reverent ex-
egesis undertaken by his disciples.”53
Stil , had Lacan been followed by isolated individuals, in the
absence of any external indication that their growing efforts
236 ch ap t er 14
would be rewarded, most would likely have given up long before
things had reached the heights of Lacan’s later years. But the
groupies were, as the name suggests, a group, seeing in the
others’ efforts an affirmation of their own interpretive labors.
As Lévi- Strauss noted when he attended one of Lacan’s semi-
nars: “I found myself in the midst of an audience that seemed
to understand.”54
Once it is widely assumed the master’s edicts unfailingly re-
veal deep hidden truths, any admission to the contrary is seen
as either an intellectual failure— that one is too dense to fathom
the “crystal- clear” prose—or, worse, as an act of treason warrant-
ing ostracism. The guru even raises the stakes by proclaiming
the transparency of his discourse, as when he states: “In simple
terms, this only means that in a universe of discourse nothing
contains every thing.”55 If this is so simple, then those who don’t
understand must really be dunces. And so the followers opine:
“Lacan is, as he himself says, a crystal- clear author.”56 Members
of the inner circle cannot admit that the emperor is naked, thus
preserving the illusion that Lacan’s obscurity hides profound
revelations.
To make things worse, the pupils are credentialed, forming the
next generation of public intellectuals and university professors.
This greatly extends the master’s influence, as outsiders are
bound to won der how such a group of smart people could be so
utterly misguided. Again, obscurity plays in Lacan’s favor. If his
theories were understandable, outsiders could form their own
opinions. But their obscurity protects Lacan’s writings from the
prying eyes of critics, who must defer to those who seem to be
knowledgeable enough to make sense of it all, or reject them en
bloc and risk looking as if they have no appreciation for intellec-
tual sophistication.
sh a l l o w g ur us 237
What to Do?
On the whole, people are pretty good at figuring out who knows
best. But there are exceptions. In this chapter, I have described
three mechanisms through which people might end up being
unduly deferential, leading them to ponder incomprehensible
beliefs, endorse counterintuitive ideas, and, occasionally, inflict
(what they think are) severe electric shocks on a hapless victim.
I will now suggest some potential remedies to alleviate the con-
sequences of each of these mechanisms.
The first mechanism relies on the granting of reputation on
credit: thinking people competent when they say things that ap-
pear useful, but that will never be properly checked (such as
Alex Jones’s dire warnings). In theory at least, the solution is rela-
tively straightforward: to stop granting so much reputation on
credit. Take the case of threats. We can still pay attention to
people who warn us of vari ous threats and take what they say into
consideration, but we should stop rewarding them with our def-
erence until we have more information about the real ity of the
threat. The same goes for justifications. Maybe there’s a pundit
we enjoy in part because they always provide us with articulate
rationales for our preexisting opinions. If these justifications are
then properly evaluated—we use them in arguments with friends
who disagree with us, say— every thing is fine. But if the justifi-
cations are not tested, then it is likely we have not only accepted
dubious information but also formed an inflated opinion of a
par tic u lar pundit.
A second way of becoming unduly deferential is to rely on
coarse cues to estimate how scientific a piece of information is,
with the risk of thinking the information more scientific than it
is. As mentioned earlier, there is no magic trick here, as only some
experts are typically able to evaluate in depth a new scientific
238 ch ap t er 14
result. Every one else must rely on more or less coarse cues. Stil ,
we can all strive to use finer- grained cues. Phi los o pher Alvin
Goldman suggested a series of cues people could use to evalu-
ate scientific claims, from how consensual the claims are among
experts, to whether the scientists who defend the claims have
conflicts of interests.57 We should in par tic u lar be wary of flashy
new results, opting to rely instead on work grounded in many
separate studies. In the field of medicine, the Cochrane organ-
ization provides systematic reviews whose conclusions are vastly
more reliable than the latest headline about coffee/wine/blue-
berries/kombucha causing/protecting us from cancer. In any
case, we shouldn’t turn our noses up at coarse cues: they might
help some shady stuff spread, but they are still better than a blan-
ket re sis tance to science, which seems to be the only practical
alternative.
Fi nally, how to get rid of gurus who rely on the obscurity of
their pronouncements to hide the vacuity of their thought? After
all, even if Lacan, along with the great wave of impenetrable post-
modern thinkers from the mid- twentieth century, is dead, gurus
still walk among us. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist who has
become incredibly popu lar, in part thanks to his intuitive defense
of conservative ideas. Other parts of his oeuvre, however, are
somewhat more baroque, such as this snippet from his Maps of
Meaning:
The constant transcendence of the future serves to destroy the
absolute sufficiency of all previous historically determined
systems, and ensures that the path defined by the revolution-
ary hero remains the one constant route to redemption.58
While we certainly haven’t reached terminal Lacanianism, I
still find it difficult to figure out what any of this means (even in
context). The equally popu lar Deepak Chopra is also known for
sh a l l o w g ur us 239
his enigmatic tweets, such as “Mechanics of Manifestation: In-
tention, detachment, centered in being allowing juxtaposition
of possibilities to unfold,” or “As beings of light we are local and
non- local, time bound and timeless actuality and possibility.”59
Fortunately, spotting gurus is comparatively easy: they have no
standing in the scientific community—at least not for the part
of their work for which they use their guru status. Outside of the
&n
bsp; sciences that rely heavi ly on mathe matics (and some might argue
even then), just about any idea should be communicable with
enough clarity that an educated and attentive reader can grasp
it. If something looks like a jumble of complicated words pasted
together, even in context, and after a bit of effort, then it prob-
ably is.
Doing this work is all the more impor tant as one of the most
plausible reasons why so many people like to have a guru is that
the guru allows them to look more competent and knowledge-
able, as the members of Lacan’s inner circle did in France. While
this may not always be a conscious pro cess, the fact that the fol-
lowers of a guru tend to be so vocal about the guru’s intellectual
prowess and depth of wisdom suggests the pro cess isn’t one of
purely individual enlightenment. By challenging this prowess and
wisdom, we deprive the followers of one advantage of having a
guru, and the guru of some followers.
15
ANGRY PUNDITS AND SKILLFUL
CON MEN
in his 2004 book The Com pany of Strangers, economist Paul
Seabright points out how weird humans are in their reliance on
strangers, people to whom they aren’t related, and, increasingly,
people whom they have never met in person. Until relatively
recently in our history, most of the people we cooperated with
were well known to us, and we could use a long trail of inter-
actions to gauge people’s value as cooperation partners.1 Nowa-
days, the situation has changed: we get our news from journalists,
our knowledge of how the world works from scientists, and
moral guidance from religious or philosophical leaders, often
without ever meeting any of these people in person. We also let
surgeons we have met only once operate on us, teachers we
barely know educate our children, and pi lots we have never seen
fly us across oceans. How do we decide who to trust in these novel
situations?
In this chapter, I explore two of the ways in which we end up
trusting the wrong people. The first is when people display their
loyalty to us, or to our group, by taking our side in disputes even
though it does not cost them anything to do so. The second is
when we use coarse cues— from someone’s profession to their
ethnicity—to figure out who to trust. Both mechanisms can
make us trust too much— I shouldn’t have believed that fake
240
a n g r y p und i t s a nd sk il l f ul c o n me n 241
doctor who scammed me of twenty euros. Stil , on the whole
we are more likely to err by not trusting when we should, rather
than by trusting when we shouldn’t.
Taking Sides
Even if the prob lem we now face routinely— how to trust com-
plete strangers—is evolutionarily novel, we still rely on the cog-
nitive mechanisms that evolved to help us find allies in a very
diff er ent environment. A crucial ele ment is that our allies should
have our back: When a conflict arises between us and someone
else, whose side are they on? We see these moments as defining
in relationships. An employee only knows if the man ag er is truly
supportive when there’s a dispute with a client. We learn the ex-
tent of a romantic partner’s commitment by looking at how
they behave in a conflict between us and their friends. Our col-
league’s allegiances are made clear when a fight erupts between
cliques at work.
These moments are revealing because taking sides is costly:
those we do not side with see our be hav ior as a clear sign that
they have been spurned, and in turn see us as less desirable co-
operation partners. The logic is broadly similar to that of burn-
ing bridges, except that it antagonizes only one specific individ-
ual or group instead of provoking as many people as pos si ble.
In both cases, the signal— that we want to affiliate with a given
individual or group—is made credible by the costs in terms of
lost opportunities to affiliate with others.
In small communities, where every body knows every body,
this signal is indeed credible: the people we side against are
people we could have cooperated with, so the costs are genuine.
Indeed, the higher the costs, the more credible the signal. In the
schoolyard, if you get in a fight with an unpop u lar wimpy kid,
242 ch ap t er 15
it doesn’t cost others much to take your side. But those who sup-
port you in a fight against the school bully are risking some-
thing, and their commitment is all the more meaningful.
In our modern environments, it is quite easy to take sides
without paying any costs. Imagine I’m having drinks in a bar with
a friend, and he gets into a verbal argument with the people at
the next table. Taking my friend’s side is essentially costless, as
it is unlikely I will ever see the people he’s arguing with again. As
a result, it is not a strong indicator of how much the friendship
means to me. The strategy of appearing to take people’s sides,
while paying only minimal costs, is widely used by social media
personalities, pundits, and even entire news channels.
A good example from the United States is that of cable news
networks. For many years, news networks in the United States
were broadly nonpartisan, barely taking sides, presumably to
avoid antagonizing part of their audience. When Fox News
Channel and MSNBC were created, they had a slight slant (to
the right and the left, respectively), but they mostly stuck with the
same plan. However, their strategy shifted over the years, as they
increasingly relied on market fragmentation to gain audience
share.2 Instead of attempting to please every one, Fox News
Channel targeted conservative Republicans, MSNBC liberal
Demo crats. Both channels increased their slant, so that it became
quite transparent who they were siding with. However, while
these channels— and their hosts— pay a cost for their partisan-
ship, it pales by comparison with the benefits: what they lose in
terms of viewers from the other side is more than made up for
by gains from the side they cheer for. In this sense, both cable
news networks (and the many other players who rely on the same
strategy) hijack our cognitive mechanisms. They take our side
in what we perceive to be cultural battles with people on the op-
posite side of the po liti cal spectrum. But they do so while pay-
a n g r y p und i t s a nd sk il l f ul c o n me n 243
ing only a small cost in lost audiences, so their stance does not
reveal any genuine commitment.
To make things worse, the strategy of taking sides to win over
an audience encourages the spread of misrepre sen ta tions about
the power of our (supposed) enemies, or the very existence of
these enemies. As noted earlier, the degree of commitment sig-
naled by the act of taking sides depends on the costs incurred,
and thus, inter alia, on the power of those we side against. Agents
who want to gain our trust by taking our side
thus benefit from
portraying the other side as im mensely power ful. Fox News says
liberals control the media, po liti cal discourse, the universities.
MSNBC claims conservatives control most po liti cal offices, big
businesses, financial contributions. Some of these portrayals are
more accurate than others, but they all underestimate the vari-
ous countervailing forces, checks and balances, that foil the am-
bitions of even the most power ful groups on either side. Stil ,
these portrayals are sure to find an avid audience, as information
about the power of other groups is deemed highly relevant. At
the same time, the complexity of our economic and po liti cal en-
vironments is all too easily ignored by cognitive mechanisms
that evolved by dealing with much simpler co ali tions.
An even more fundamental prerequisite for the strategy of tak-
ing sides is that there should be sides to begin with. While we’re
all embroiled in a variety of low- grade disputes between groups—
with family members, neighbors, colleagues— these are too
local to be of any interest to, say, a cable news channel. Instead,
the conflicts must involve as many individuals as pos si ble: on our
side, so that the channel gains more audience, and on the other,
so that the enemy looks more power ful. Agents, such as hosts
on cable news networks, who rely on the taking- side strategy to
gain audiences, benefit if they portray the world as divided and
polarized.
244 ch ap t er 15
As we saw in chapter 13, U.S. citizens are not all that ideologi-
cally polarized. However, they are perceived as being so: several
studies observed that “ people significantly misperceive the pub-
lic to be more divided along partisan lines than it is in real ity.”3
For example, the attitudes of Demo crats and Republicans on free
trade are remarkably similar, being very close to the middle of
the road, with a slightly more positive view for Republicans.
However, Demo crats are perceived as being anti– free trade
(which they aren’t, on average), and Republicans as being
strongly pro– free trade (which they aren’t, again on average).
These mistaken perceptions are driven by news consumption.4
In some countries, this means TV, but the most reliable driver
of inflated perceived polarization is the heavy consumption of on-
