Not Born Yesterday

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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-

 

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