A race to the bottom of epistemic bankruptcy.

What counts as a neutral third party? A source of truth? Do we agree what even constitutes knowable?

(“Fog” by Stella Stillwell)

I lately wonder: do we even have an agreed-upon epistemological criteria?

Do we have a shared definition for what good faith means anymore?

Do we have anything close to an unbiased set of rules or standards we can use to decide what’s actually a foul, what’s out of bounds, what counts as a point scored?

Yeah, sure, we have a robust legal system. And that’s fantastic.

But in the court of public opinion, do we agree on what would even count as a neutral referee of some kind? You can’t compete without a neutral third party. That’s why we have referees.

That’s also why we have a “source of truth” in the first place. So we can check to see which things are actually the case and which are not.

To see which things are being thought through accurately and which are being muddled.

To do that, we need a shared definition of what “accurate” and “muddled” even mean.

We’ve lost that. Seems like the country needs to call a time out, and establish how we even KNOW who’s right anymore, about knowable things. Do we agree what constitutes “knowable?”

I naively used to think Wikipedia or high-brow news was society’s tie-breaker. If we disagreed about what’s real, we could go there and find out. In theory, a crowd-sourced wiki is a great way to ensure a public reservoir of facts and beliefs that stand the test of time.

But I had never lived through a truly populist revolution before. It’s clear that those things are no longer trusted by enough people for it to matter. Epistemology (how we come to believe the things we believe) is now just a free-for-all with no rules.

Guessing is fair. Lying is fair. They say all is fair in love and war. So does this mean we’re at war? Because it doesn’t feel like love.

When the rules of good faith go out the window, it’s no longer about referees. It’s about trench and alley warfare.

It’s about elimination of dissent and getting what you want at all costs.

In other words, a race to the bottom of epistemic poverty, a mad dash to tear out the opponent’s neck. A kill-or-be-killed mentality.

The Inevitable Intentional Fog Of War

I slept through social studies classes and cheated on the Constitution final. My underpaid teachers were sleepwalking through the lesson plan. The budget to inspire kids to know what freedom meant was clearly not high enough, or it wasn’t taken seriously. The result: a generation that’s ill-equipped to preserve our republic.

Now I know: Every American is responsible for being loyal to good faith, due process, and obedience to an ideal.

We have a Constitution, and a calm, orderly, organized way to resolve our differences. It needs to be protected with heart and guts. With brave and constant messaging that respects the line between gamely persuasion and weaponized rhetoric and semantic pharmacology.

We have to despise the slippery art of corrosive dual messaging, the kind with plausible deniability that Trump has mastered, and that his constituency seems to love.

The whole job of great leaders should have been to inspire people to stick to our original ideals. We don’t do that with facts and figures. We do that with emotions. We embody that ideal in how we speak and carry ourselves. We have to mean it, because it’s hard to fake. This is why I liked Obama, I think. Whether he ultimately succeeded in his policy goals, he succeeded in making me care about America again. He made me feel proud of our clarity, sincerity, and dignity.

He made me feel hopeful, that he could inspire citizens to honor decorum and avoid forming stampedes and succumbing to low-brow mob logic.

To avoid the worst of mob logic, we have courts. But just outside the courtroom, America is a wild court of public opinion. It has no stringent rules, no jury, no bailiff. It runs on yelling and popularity contests.

Alarmingly, our country is now a cesspool of fallacies and motivated logic. Why do I care? Because that’s the cesspool in which the voting takes place. (God help us.)

I didn’t know this, not viscerally, until well into adulthood. Most of us don’t. That’s tragic.

Our leaders must have failed us, and yet we, the people, put those leaders there in the first place because we want the pageantry and we apparently like the lying. We like playing dirty if it’s a means to an end we believe in. And we like believing in ends that serve us. We want permission to believe in all the things that make us feel special, safe, empowered, regardless of who it hurts. In other words, it’s our own doing.

The current situation we’re in is not really blamable on any specific people or ideals. It’s a reflection of the human animal and how it behaves at certain points in the lifespan of an empire. Accelerated by modern technology, but certainly not created by it.

Today’s populism is a wake-up call. Without orderly, organized, and relevant back-and-forth communication that seeks to be cogent and sincere, a truly democratic state devoted to both liberty and welfare doesn’t have a chance.

If winning via insincerity and b.s. rhetoric becomes the aesthetic du jour, (and it has) we’re in massive danger.

What now?