I want to drive home four points in this essay:
Institutional authority generally arises from consensus. The consensus is more important than whatever evidence said authority offers to support its claims.
The only real exception to 1) is natural science.
I define “technocracy” as a spurious claim to the authority of natural science on behalf of a government.
A “nihilistic” stance is an effective rhetorical tool to combat technocracy.
Point 1: Institutional authority arises from consensus
First example: if you’re a Chinese peasant during the Tang dynasty, then you view the Emperor as a legitimate authority because he has the Mandate of Heaven. You believe that he has the Mandate of Heaven because that’s what everyone says. We’re all feeling very comfortable and secure and things are good, so we all agree that the Emperor has the Mandate of Heaven. So we don’t overthrow him and we do what he says. Eventually, things stop being good, and we decide that the Emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, so we overthrow him and have a period of upheaval, and then the Song dynasty finally takes over. Once things stop being good, the consensus breaks.
Second example: if you live in a small 16th-century English village, you trust the village priest. You trust him because he represents the Church. And you believe in the Church because everybody else believes in the Church. So we don’t work on the feast days, because the Church says so, and if there’s anything we need to know, we ask the priest Eventually, secular authorities become disgruntled because the Church won’t let them do what they want, so you wind up with Henry VIII starting the English Reformation just to get his way.
Third example: you’re an American living in 2020. A bunch of three-letter agencies with very scientific-sounding names claim that you need to wear a mask, shelter in place, and obey a curfew. Lockdowns occur to prevent a huge spike in hospitalizations. Sweden doesn’t lock down and has no such surge, but you obey the lockdown orders anyway because everyone else is doing it. Eventually, the masks and the shots and all the rest just stop because nobody wants to comply anymore. Not a rebellion, so much as a collective “meh, I can’t be arsed”.
Notice that, in each case, the authority can offer some (rather thin) evidence that it ought to be in charge.
The Tang Emperor could claim that the centuries of peace and prosperity under his dynasty prove that he should be in charge. But the moment things get bad, we overthrow him anyway. His authority was never based on rational considerations. It was based on the fact that everybody had a full belly and nobody was getting their head cut off.
The Church could claim to be on a divine mission, and that it has God’s approval. European kings bought this because Christianizing effectively gave them job security; the divine right of Kings, established by the church, made it seem as if every king was put in place by God. Of course, nobody wants to anger God, so regicide becomes much less common post-conversion. The authority was based on consensus: everyone agreed that the Church was a legitimate authority because it worked for everyone involved. But then Henry VIII gets the bright idea to make his own church, throw off the Roman yoke, and still retain the notion of divine right without Rome. As soon as one sufficiently powerful person dissented, the consensus went up in smoke, along with Roman authority over England.
As to the lockdowns, there was plenty of scientific-looking evidence that they were a good idea. There were all kinds of charts and columns and graphs — and no shortage of experts — all telling you to stay inside. Of course, Sweden had no such lockdowns, and they didn’t have the prophesied apocalyptic death rates. So the lockdowns were not strictly necessary. It was all based on consensus. The media attempted to preserve the consensus by blaring news about every new variant and trumpeting the need for vaccines. But that consensus couldn’t be manufactured, in the end; everybody just collectively quit giving a shit.
Now, two more points. First, authority is always rationalized. Second, consensus trumps that rationale.
To the first point: authority is always rationalized. institutions claim authority based on a pretext, which can be very flimsy. They have to. Nobody can say, “I’m in charge because I’m in charge and fuck you if you say otherwise”. That might have worked among hunter gatherers (or on a playground, which is much the same thing) but it doesn’t work in civilization. Every authority, including supposedly “absolute” monarchies, has to maintain some semblance of approval by the populace. This even holds for imperial powers and conquered territories. Marcus Aurelius famously argued that Rome had the right to rule the world for a reason: it could be proven from first principles that humans naturally belong in a single world-state. Naturally, I disagree with him, but the people who set foreign policy for the United States think in much the same way that he did. They just think that the capital of the world is Washington, not Rome.
To the second point: consensus trumps rationale. I can’t offer any deductive proof of this, but I think it’s evident if you look at how institutions (including governments) rise and fall. The Emperor has the Mandate of Heaven until we all decide that he doesn’t. The Church has authority over England until the English King decides that it doesn’t. The lockdowns are deadly important and we must all get the vaccine three times a year in perpetuity, until we get bored and go back outside. As soon as the consensus is broken, whatever pretext is offered for authority just goes up in smoke.
Point 2: Natural science as the exception
I want to distinguish two related claims here.
First, there is a normative claim, which is that we ought to believe in natural science on the evidence. While I do agree with that claim, it’s not what I’m defending here. I am not trying to convince my reader to believe in physics. If you don’t believe in physics, figure out why your GPS works and get back to me.
Second, there is a descriptive claim, which is the one I’m actually making. The descriptive claim is this: natural science is (mostly) upstream of consensus. I’m not saying that we “should” believe in natural science. I’m saying that, like it or not, advancements in natural science have the capability to force social change, in a way that social sciences do not.
Let me give three illustrative examples.
The first example is psychology, a social science. Psychology is very much downstream of consensus; psychologists, like most social scientists, are in the business of rationalizing policy. In the Soviet Union, the diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” was given to dissidents as a means of discrediting them. On the other side, Adorno and others gave their account of the “Authoritarian personality” after the end of WWII. This was an attempt to pathologize Nazism in order to prevent its recurrence. Notice how the social sciences are downstream of consensus. It’s about rationalizing.
The second example is from physics. During World War Two, things like relativity and quantum mechanics were derided as “Jewish physics”. But the German nuclear program was still pursued using relativity and quantum mechanics, because you simply can’t build a nuclear bomb any other way. Consensus ran up against natural science, and consensus lost.
The third example is biology. In the Soviet Union, there was a thing called Lysenkoism, enacted by a Soviety biologist named Trofim Lysenko. Lysenkoism was the claim that Western notions of genetics and natural selection were a kind of “bourgeois biology”, a capitalist perversion of science. Instead, Lysenko and his followers favored Larmackian evolution. Lysenko’s ideologically-driven rejection of modern biology caused a decline in crop yields in the Soviet Union. The argument can be made that he was personally responsible for starving many people. But, by the 1950s, Lysenkoism was in decline! As it turned out, no amount of Marxist orthodoxy could increase crop yields. Only biology could do that. Consensus ran up against natural science, and consensus lost.
Notice how natural science can be repressed for a time. But in the end, “truth will out”. The Roman Church could not suppress heliocentrism; the Nazis could not repress modern physics; the Soviets fought Darwin and lost. The Church changed its mind, the Nazis changed their minds, and the Soviets changed their minds. Curiously, this has also worked in the opposite direction: when Georges Lemaître posited the Big Bang theory, he was accused — by Einstein, no less! — of basing his ideas on Christian dogma. But in the end, physicists changed their minds.
Point 3: Technocracy is a spurious claim to scientific authority
Do a little thought experiment for me. Imagine that you’re some sort of administrator, or bureaucrat. You live in a techno-industrial society where “scientific” is synonymous with being true and practical. You live in a society where doctors wear unnecessary lab coats, just because it makes them look like scientists. The rhetorical force of the word, “science”, is so phenomenally powerful. And you, a bureaucrat, would like to have that absolute power for yourself. How do you go about getting it?
Well, that’s simple: you magick up some “experts” who “discover” whatever you need them to discover. You scream as loud as you can on all speakers that *~!THE SCIENCE!~* says to obey you. You fill the media with charts and graphs and diagrams and throw around terms like gain-of-function and R-naught. Go back and read some news releases from 2020 through 2021. The word “science” is used in an almost incantatory fashion.
(That little detail about some countries not needing lockdowns? Well, that doesn’t matter because SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE!)
Of course, “science” doesn’t exist as some Platonic (or Popperian) method of self-critical inquiry. That’s an idea, or an ideal. Science exists as an industry, or better yet, as multiple industries. Following Alex Epstein’s points on the matter, for a study to become policy, you need:
Researchers to study things
People to synthesize the findings of that research
Some kind of publicist or writers to disseminate the synthesized findings
Analysts who can decide what to do with all that
Every step of this process is vulnerable to error, corruption, and manipulation. The people who study things might have just found a fluke; researchers make mistakes all the time. The people who synthesize those findings have to use a lot of natural-language reasoning to come to a non-trivial conclusion about the studies, and this is vulnerable to mistakes and bias. It is synthetic in the sense that it goes beyond the data somehow, for if it didn’t, it would be trivial and uninteresting. The people in charge of disseminating that (possibly wrong) synthesis are generally not scientists at all, but journalists — and that ought to make your skin crawl. Finally, the analysts who decide what to do with all this are generally in the pay of bodies that are political or politics-adjacent; this introduces a whole slew of opportunities for distortion, bias, manipulation, and outright lies.
Every link in the chain offers new opportunities for misuse. And the widespread consensus that we ought to trust natural science means that there’s a huge amount of power tied up therein. What bureaucrat could resist?
What we’ve seen over the past century, with a big acceleration around 2020, is the attempt by governing bodies to claim a scientific basis for their authority. This happens through two means. First, the abuse of natural science, by messing with the logistical chain I just mentiones. Second, the elevation of social science to a place equal to natural science. The first one is bad. The second is far worse.
So, what can we do?
Point 4: Rhetorical nihilism saves the day
There is a simple process to undermining institutional authority, and I call it rhetorical nihilism. The process works like this:
Point out the existence of power relations around a consensus
Draw attention to its self-perpetuating nature while minimizing the rationale it uses to protect itself
Posit an alternative based on “I want”
The first step is accomplished by means of the sort of reasoning that Foucault would recognize. Instead of asking, “Is this true?” you ask, “Who said this, on what authority, and what do they want?”
For example, take gender affirming care. Don’t ask, “Is it true that a thirteen year old girl needs a double mastectomy because she’s trans?” That question is a black hole, a rabbit trail we can follow forever. You can debate that until the cows come home.
Instead, ask, “Who says that ‘trans kids’ need medical intervention? What authority do they say that on? And what do they want to happen?” The answers are, respectively: progressives say that, as do pharmaceutical companies. They say that on the authority of being designated experts, or maybe just being morally righteous. What they want is lots of expensive medical intervention on children, beginning as early as possible, and continuing life-long.
Trans-tech is a budding industry with an enormous opportunity, RKA claims. “Our estimates place the average cost of transition at $150,000 per person. Multiply that by an estimated population of 1.4 million transgender people, we’re taking about a market in excess of $200B. That is significant. That’s larger than the entire film industry.”
Trans-Tech Is A Budding Industry: So Why Is No One Investing In It?
This isn’t limited to gender-affirming care, of course. Many progressive doctrines can be attacked in this way. Another example: the American Psychological Association claims that masculinity is toxic. Don’t ask if masculinity really is toxic and wind up arguing about it. That’s just a distraction, a red herring. Instead, you ask this: who said that? On what authority? And what do they want? The answers are, respectively: a group of technocrats said it. They did so on the authority of social science. And they want lots of people to go to therapy (which costs money) and agree with them about gender, and act like them.
You can do it with the COVID stuff, too. Did we need the lockdowns, or the masks, or the shots? Don’t ask if we really needed them. Instead, ask, “Who said that we need lockdowns, masks, and shots? What authority are they saying that on? And what do they want?”
So much for step one.
Step two is to draw attention to the self-perpetuating nature of a consensus and efface its rationale.
This is the tricky part. It requires familiarity with the subject matter, which changes depending on what you want to attack. It also requires some rhetorical skill, the ability to minimize things.
Basically, you point out that “everybody believes this because everybody else believes it”. Whenever they try to produce a rationale, attack its foundations by taking a cynical perspective. Frame it all in terms of power relations and self-interest.
“But doctors say that trans kids need mastectomies at 16!” Yeah, and doctors make money off of that. So do pharmaceutical companies. An investor somewhere, some guy with lots of money tied up in trans-tech, is salivating right now at the thought of life-long medical interventions beginning at 16.
“But psychologists say that masculinity is toxic!” So what? That’s not science. Psychologists go into their field because they’re not smart enough to do natural science. Their work consists entirely of abusing mathematical formulas that they don’t understand. And psychology has a very long, sordid history of political abuses. I don’t buy it.
“But Fauci said we need to do XYZ!” I’ll leave this one as an exercise to the reader.
So much for the second step.
Step 3 is to posit an alternative based on “I want”.
“I don’t want my kid getting her breasts cut off before she’s even a legal adult. If she wants to do that when she’s an adult, it’s her choice. But I want the right to institute my children as I see fit.”
“I think social science is a load of hooey, and it never gets us beyond common sense anyway. Instead, I’m going to act however I want without regard for whether it’s theoretically ‘toxic’ according to some technocrat.”
Remember that this step only works if it follows the first two. You can’t just dismiss a scientific consensus with “I want”. But you can dismiss it if you point out that the consensus, itself, is founded on the desires of a subset of the population. Once the spurious claim to scientific authority has been deflated, it becomes a contest of wills. And you win that contest by saying “I want”.